


bang bang delicious

by magicsoul (cherishiskisa)



Series: cdf verse [5]
Category: NCT (Band), WeishenV
Genre: Brunch, Double Dating, LuTen, Lucas Learns Some Things, Lucas... Gets Woke?, M/M, Maybe The Real Wokeness Was The Friends Lucas Made Along The Way, Morning Sex, Surprises, Target Shenanigans, TenCas, blah blah ship tags, yukten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-15 15:58:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17531783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherishiskisa/pseuds/magicsoul
Summary: Life comes at you fast: one minute you can be in bed with some amazing twink all over you, and the next you’re just wobbling around naked, chilly, and late to brunch, and also your mouth tastes like garbage.





	1. kissy kissy

**Author's Note:**

> hello everyone welcome to cdf5 !!!! at this point ur better off reading at least a couple other things from the series so ur caught up, and thank u so much to everyone for reading and enjoying it so far :'''))) this ones wacky lets get right into it!!! sobs its so long im so sorry (however the summary is so short YET AGAIN and im sorry about that too hkjrsdnrjksd)
> 
> title from a.d.i.d.a.s by little mix

“Lemme see if I get it,” Lucas said slowly. “So what you’re telling me is… brunch is a combination between breakfast and lunch, and it’s… a thing gay people do?”

“There you go,” Ten said. “It only took me five minutes, wow. I think that’s a new record with you.”

Lucas was only acting like he got it, though; he was still pretty confused. Wouldn’t that just be breakfast at lunchtime? After all, breakfast for dinner wasn’t called brinner, although maybe it should be. And he definitely didn’t understand the gay connection, but whatever, he’d figure that out as he went along and take Ten’s word as gay gospel in the meantime. “And it’s on Sundays?”

“Brunch can be any day of the week,” Ten said, then said something else, but Lucas didn’t hear it because he’d reached up to put a swanky nightlight shaped like Darth Vader’s face on a higher shelf and the movement of his arm had knocked one of his AirPods loose. 

“Hang on, hang on, I can’t hear you,” Lucas said, fumbling to catch the AirPod and Darth at the same time. That was obviously impossible, so for the sake of keeping his job and avoiding being destroyed by the Dark Side, he opted to catch the Sith Lord, and the AirPod clattered away somewhere under one of the other shelves. “Fuck. Hang on, Ten, I lost an AirPod.”

“Luckily there’s two,” Ten said in his left ear and Lucas finished putting the nightlight up and began his search for the missing AirPod. “Unless you also lost an ear. I hope you didn’t. You know I like your ears.”

Lucas did know that, actually, even if Ten had never said as much, and he sort of embarrassedly went “Pshaw” as he leaned down to look over the floor and see where it had gone off to. “So you were saying about brunch?”

“Yeah, I am usually talking about brunch,” Ten sighed. His voice sounded much breathier over the phone, but otherwise, it wasn’t all that different from talking in real life. “All I said was it can be anytime, but it’s usually on weekends, and this one is this Sunday, yes.”

“And who all’s gonna be there?” Lucas said, then, “Hoho!”

“Found it?” Ten said, sounding like he was smiling.

“Yep,” Lucas said and popped it back into his ear, Target floor dust and all. Luckily he’d found it pretty fast and nobody had seen him visibly having a conversation with thin air (par for the course for Lucas, depending on how boring his shift was), but that was because it was still fairly early in the morning, and all his coworkers were milling around elsewhere while Lucas lurked in the far back corner of Home Improvement so he and Ten could talk. “Anyways, what?”

“You, me, Yuta, Yuta’s man,” Ten listed. 

Lucas made a yikes face. His first, last, and only interaction with Yuta hadn’t gone so great, obviously, even though Ten had stuck up for him a couple times, and he wasn’t really looking forward to having a whole-ass fusion breakfast-lunch meal with him. “Okay,” he said. “Wait, his man? Oh, his, uh… apple?”

“Mhm, they finally made up, and you’ll like him, he’s really normal,” Ten said, which didn’t bode well at all for anyone. “So does that mean you’re coming?”

Lucas pulled out his phone to check his work schedule and see if he was supposed to be working Sunday. In the meantime, he had some questions. “Can I ask you something first?”

“I don’t see how I could stop you,” Ten said, sighing out a breath right against his phone and making the AirPods in Lucas’s ears crackle ticklishly. “But make it quick, hon, I have to go back to work.”

“I’m _actively_ at work _right now_ ,” Lucas pointed out, blushing very hard at being called hon so casually and putting his phone up again. “What I wanted to ask was: why’s it called brunch and not lunchfast? Is it because then it might be confusing since brunch is supposed to take a long time, not a short time? How about lreakfast? I guess that’s harder to say. Why is a late lunch called supper and not linner, then?”

There was a long silence and Lucas waited patiently, although he knew Ten wouldn’t be able to answer any of Lucas’s very insightful questions. Finally, Ten said, “So I’ll see you Sunday.”

“Hold on, I’m supposed to be working that day, lemme go ask a manager if I can switch shifts,” Lucas said, unclipping his walkie-talkie and taking one AirPod out. 

“Oh,” Ten said. “Are you sure? We could probably reschedule for next week if you can’t, but Yuta might make me hang out with them anyway, which defeats the whole purpose of you coming along to keep me from third-wheeling.”

“Shh,” Lucas said and activated the walkie-talkie. “Heyyy, does anyone have eyes on Kun or D-man?” D-man was his fun new nickname for Doyoung. It was catching on with everyone, but Doyoung absolutely hated it, and yes, Lucas was definitely afraid that Doyoung would show up at the foot of his bed one stormy night and strangle him to death with his cold lizard hands, but oh well, it was funny while Lucas was still alive to tell the tale! 

A couple people replied that no, they hadn’t, but someone else suggested that Lucas check the staff room, so he happily headed off thataways. “I’ll let you know right now if I can go or not,” he told Ten, “just hang tight.”

“How is Kun, anyway?” Ten hummed. “Has he asked about me more?”

Every time Lucas remembered about Kun and Ten’s fling, he literally felt like he’d been slimed at the Kids’ Choice Awards, and he shuddered, cringing. “Nope,” he said. Other than the fact that they’d interacted with the same dick, Kun was pretty cool, and always let Lucas bring Slurpees to work and take 20 minutes instead of 15 on his breaks, so Lucas thought his odds for switching weekend shifts were pretty good. 

“Why not? I’m offended,” Ten said, not sounding offended at all. 

Lucas kept cringing, then shushed Ten very gently again as he went into the staff room. It was empty, but he remembered that Kun had said something about doing some new hire interviews today and kept walking through to the back office, the door of which was partially open. Over the background noise coming from wherever Ten was playing in his AirPods, he could hear someone talking, but he and Kun were good now, so he figured he didn’t need to knock and just stuck his head in, saying, “Wassup, dude, can I—”

“Fuck,” Kun gasped, grabbing a fistful of Doyoung’s hair and pulling him away. 

Oh, no. OH NO. They were both on top of the office desk and the chair had been knocked over, and by their very red mouths and flushed faces and also by how Doyoung was _literally between Kun’s legs_ , Lucas could tell that they’d just been furiously making out. Doyoung looked back over his shoulder, then scrambled to get away from Kun, and they both stood up, staring at Lucas, who was frozen in the doorway.

“Hey guys what’s good,” he said, his eyes literally burning. He’d never been religious in his life, but now he wanted to chug several gallons of holy water, and also go jump off the nearest bridge and never speak to anyone ever again. “I’m scheduled to work on Sunday morning but can I switch to a different shift or I can work extra hours next week to make up for it sorry for the short notice. This is the worst day of my life and I didn’t mean to say that out loud I’m so sorry.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine,” Kun said, smoothing down his shirt, wiping his mouth, and breathing heavily. “You know what, how about you take the whole day off? Would that be okay? I’ll fix the schedule for you, please don’t worry about it.”

“Sounds great thanks so much guys,” Lucas said. He was rooted to the floor and couldn’t move, going past screaming internally and straight to completely brain-dead from shock, horror, terror, horror, and shock. 

Kun exhaled a big breath and covered his face with one hand. Doyoung, who’d been silent and perfectly still in that uncomfortable lizardly way of his this whole time, raised an arm to very politely touch Kun’s back to comfort him, and Kun just as politely pushed his hand away. Lucas couldn’t look away: it was like a car crash, if the two cars involved were family-friendly sedans that were now on fire and had also been sliced in half thanks to the sheer strength of the gay chaos Lucas was currently experiencing. Lucas wished _he_ could be on fire or sliced in half or both. Doyoung’s shirt was unbuttoned. Lucas craved oblivion.

“Please go away,” Kun added, and Lucas nodded hard enough to make his neck hurt but not hard enough to snap it in half, which was what he wanted, and turned around and sprinted out of the staff room.

Ten was laughing very quietly in his AirPods and Lucas had completely forgotten he was even in there, but now he wanted to die even more. “What was _that?_ ” Ten asked.

“I gotta go,” Lucas croaked. “I’m gonna go drink bleach, I gotta go.”

“What happened?” Ten insisted, still laughing. 

“I’ll tell you later,” Lucas said, scrubbing his eyes vigorously with the palms of his hands until he was seeing double. 

“Please?” Ten pouted. Over the phone, he was much less convincing than he was in real life, since Lucas couldn’t see whatever horrible powerful things he was doing with his face to wheedle Lucas into doing his evil bidding, and yet Lucas was still somehow convinced.

“I— how can I even… what is air,” Lucas mumbled. He cupped a hand over his mouth so no one would hear him, and whispered, “I walked in on Kun making out with Doyoung, the other manager.”

Ten shrieked. “ _Making out?_ Tongue or no tongue? Where were their hands, were they doing anything else? Wow, what’s Doyoung’s deal? Also, yay, you got the time off!”

“Ten,” Lucas pleaded. “I need to go drown myself. Do you know anyone who could amputate my legs?”

“I’ll do it,” Ten said, then the sound got muffled as if Ten had covered the phone with his hand, and Lucas heard him and someone else talking briefly, then Ten came back. “I gotta go, okay? Have fun at work, talk to you later! Mwah!” And he hung up.

Lucas resented Ten hanging up on him when he’d been the one who actually needed to go, but he couldn’t even find it in his heart to feel any emotion other than the same emotion he felt when his fall semester roommate had played nightcore remixes of funeral marches at top volume in the middle of the night.

“I got a customer in the toy section asking to speak to the manager,” the walkie-talkie said. “Kun or Doyoung, come in?”

Lucas numbly lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Don’t,” he said hollowly, then went to go find a can of Cheese Whiz to spray into his mouth, since there wasn’t really anything else he could do in the meantime to make himself feel better and that always cheered him up.

Spoiler alert? It worked.

Only later that week when he mentioned to his mom that he was going to brunch did he start to realize that maybe he was in a little over his head. The conversation went like this:

“…and then on Sunday I’m going to brunch!” Lucas said.

“Really?” Mom said, impressed. “How swanky! I’m so proud of you for trying something new!”

Lucas shrugged, also proud of himself. Then frowned, confused about why her first reaction to brunch was ‘swanky’. “Is brunch a fancy thing? I don’t have anything fancy to wear.”

“Well, who are you going with?” Mom asked, then her face got very squishy and it looked like she was trying to wink, but neither she nor Lucas really knew how to, so she was basically just peering at him like an owl with bad eyesight, if the owl had bangs and was 5’1” and was also Lucas’s mother. “Ten, maybe?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t say it was fancy,” Lucas said thoughtfully. “I’ll ask him.”

“Good idea, sweetheart,” Mom said, tearfully cutting another big slice of pie for Lucas and placing it on the plate in front of him. 

And Lucas was so distracted by the pie (key lime, fuck yeah!!!) that he didn’t even have time to worry more about brunch until the next day, Friday. Ten had texted him the address of the place and what time they were all supposed to meet, and Lucas had googled it and been horrified to see photos that featured cloth napkins and individual tea lights on each table. No, he couldn’t do that again, he’d given all that up when he’d been fired from his waiter job. So he texted Ten to ask if he needed to dress up.

Ten responded by just calling him, and Lucas was so shocked to hear his ringtone — Hotline Bling, of course, which was still one of Lucas’s top 5 cleverest ideas ever — that he accidentally flung his phone across the room. Once he’d gotten it back, he answered, holding the phone to his ear. “H—”

“What do you mean, dress up? It’s _brunch_ , not a costume party,” Ten said before Lucas could even get a whole word out.

“—ey,” Lucas finished. “I know it’s not a costume party, but one, that’d be dope, and two, that place looks really pricey. You went through my whole closet, like. It’s slim pickins.”

“It is,” Ten agreed, humming thoughtfully. “I’ll think of something. Nothing of mine will fit you, obvs, but I think you’d be fine in just a regular shirt.”

Ten had stolen almost all of Lucas’s regular shirts! Lucas sighed, plonking down in his desk chair and spinning around in it a few times. “And are jeans okay? The only fancy pants I have are my Target khakis, and that’s… a no from me.”

“I don’t know why you hate them so much, I think you look so cute and nerdy in your work clothes,” Ten said. Quiet rustling sounds, then Ten yawned just as quietly, making a small catlike noise. “I’m going to bed. Don’t overthink it. You’d look hot in anything.”

“Why are you going to bed? It’s only 8,” Lucas said, confused and blushing again. Ten was somehow even more shameless over the phone, which didn’t seem possible, and yet here they were. 

“So what? Bye,” Ten said and hung up on him.

Lucas blinked at his phone, then at his closet. Ten didn’t seem too worried about being seen in public with Lucas if Lucas was dressed totally inappropriately for brunch, so Lucas wouldn’t worry about it, either. And he had a long two days in front of him: A Manager Who Will Henceforth Remain Nameless Due To Crimes Against Lucas had been chill about letting him not work on Sunday, but as a result, Lucas was making up the hours on Friday and Saturday, and he’d worked for a long-ass time today and now he was super tired. Heck, maybe he’d go to bed, too, but not before tugging one out, his typical bedtime routine. 

But when he’d turned off all his lights and settled into bed, his phone rang again. This time, he didn’t fling it quite all the way across the room, just dropped it into the bedsheets and very nearly missed the call as he tried to find it again. “Yello?” he said.

“I found some jackets that might fit,” Ten said. “Come over after work tomorrow, pick whichever one you like.”

“Sure, thanks,” Lucas said, snuggling down in his sheets. Mom had changed them yesterday, so he felt like the pinnacle of cleanth and tidiness. Was this how Ten felt all the time? No wonder he had so much raw sexual power. “It’ll be late, though, I’m closing.”

“That’s fine,” Ten said. “Just text me when you’re headed out.”

“Okays,” Lucas said. “Weren’t you going to bed?”

“Oh, right!” Ten remembered and hung up on him again.

And he claimed Lucas was the weirdo? “SMH,” Lucas said out loud, then shoved his hand down his pajama bottoms. 

What he hadn’t accounted for was just how long he was scheduled to work tomorrow; 12 to 9, and then closing, which meant he’d have to stay for at least another half-hour to clean. By the time he was wrapping up, all his legs hurt and he was dying for some tater tots. He texted Ten to ask if he wanted anything from Sonic because he was gonna go before catching his bus, but Ten texted back that nah, he was good, so Lucas made his sleepy way to Sonic and got about as many tater tots as he could handle and then some more for later, just in case he got hungry in his sleep and wanted to have some tots readily accessible for some sleep-munching. Hey, stranger things (season 3 coming soon, Lucas was hype!) had happened, and his nighttime tater tot cravings were very real. Better safe than sorry. 

He ate the tater tots on the bus, leaning his head on the window even though that made it hard to chew. It had been a fucking long work day, yoof, and he was sticky and super super tired. He couldn’t wait to get home and shower and pass the fuck out, but then he had brunch in the morning, ugh. Maybe Ten wouldn’t care if he got there late, but Yuta and his mysterious fruity man probably would, so Lucas had better spend as little time as possible at Ten’s place right now so he could get home and conk out ASAP.

The rest of the journey to Ten’s apartment was kind of a blur, but somehow Lucas ended up in front of his intercom, buzzing for apartment 10 and then shuffling his way upstairs when Ten let him in. He could tell that he was kinda stinky along with being sticky, although a good part of that was because of all the tater tots, some of which he’d dropped on himself when the bus had gone over a particularly tall speed bump. All in all, he felt crusty and beaten up by the khaki fist of the Target Corporation, and he knocked on Ten’s door, smothering a yawn behind his non-tater-tot-holding hand.

“You weren’t kidding, this is super late,” Ten said, opening the door for him. “Come on in, I’ll make it quick so you can go back to Vivian, my number one fave.”

Lucas, more boneless than usual, flailed in, and Ten took the Sonic bag from him and tossed it aside. Lucas very sadly watched it go, then looked at Ten again. “Why’d you toss my tots?”

“You’ll need both hands free to try on my jackets,” Ten explained, but before he could go retrieve the jackets, he looked at Lucas more critically. Lucas was sort of swaying where he stood, not quite at the level of an inflatable wiggly man advertising a used car dealership but well on the way to getting there. “Are you okay? What’s wrong with you?”

“Who, me? Yeah, I’m straight chillin,” Lucas said with a shrug. “Sorry I’m so smelly, I’ve been working since noon, so like—”

Ten squawked and then frowned, putting his hands on his hips. “Are you serious? You’ve been working all day? You must be exhausted! Go home and sleep! Why’d you even come over?”

“You told me to,” Lucas pointed out, then yawned again, rubbing his face with his hands. “I’m okay, I can try stuff on, where’s it at?”

“It’s over there, but you can shower first, if you want,” Ten offered, his frown getting smaller, and he almost looked pleased? He came over to lift all the way up on his toes and give Lucas a small kiss, and then kissed him one more time. He clearly didn’t want to touch him, though, which Lucas didn’t blame him for. “Poor baby. Is capitalism hell or what, hmm?”

“Yeah,” Lucas sighed, kissing him back. Ten seemed to have some communist tendencies, which Lucas didn’t fully understand but fully supported. “Kay, I’ll go shower. I’ll be speedy.” He made the Road Runner noise from Looney Tunes — “Beep beep!” — and stumbled his way down the hall to Ten’s bathroom, stripping as he went and leaving his jeans, shirt, socks, and underwear in a trail behind himself. 

He was pretty sure he wasn’t at risk of jerking off in there, all he wanted was to wash the gunch off himself, and now he even knew where to find a towel. And he could just put the clothes he’d been wearing earlier back on, since at Target the majority of the gunch had settled on and inside his work clothes. But he hadn’t expected the boiling hot water to feel super good on his disgusting little body, so he ended up spending more time in there than he’d planned to, and finally emerged in a refreshing cloud of steam with a towel looped around his waist.

“I didn’t jerk off,” he said immediately when Ten stuck his head out of the kitchen to check on him. 

“Miracles are real after all,” Ten said, his eyes somewhere around Lucas’s abs. Lucas was never too sleepy to flex, so he flexed for him, then leaned over to pick up the rest of his clothes from the floor. “Are you hungry? Or did you eat enough at Sonic?”

“I’m fine,” Lucas assured him, then went back into the bathroom to semi-brush his hair and redress himself, which was different than a redress of grievances, something he’d learned in 8th grade US History class and never forgotten. He drew a mustache, big teeth, and glasses over his reflection in the steamy mirror, chuckled about it for a while, then returned to the living room. “Jackets?”

“End of the couch,” Ten said. “I think you’ll look good in the denim one, but if you were planning on wearing jeans… I don’t know if you’re ready for a Canadian tuxedo yet, this isn’t the Village People. For starters, we’d need another person, since there were five of them.”

Whenever Ten started talking about things that Lucas just had no fucking idea what they were, Lucas’s best and only policy was nodding like he understood and then changing the subject. “We’re meeting at noon, right?” he said, picking up the first jacket, which seemed to be leather, and pulling it on. 

“Well, the reservation’s for noon, but we should get there a little early, since Yuta always makes fun of me for being fashionably late,” Ten sighed, coming out of the kitchen and perching on the couch so he could watch Lucas’s jacket experiments. “Maybe… 11:50? And it’s only fifteen minutes away from your house, so you don’t even have to leave that early, just be on-time.”

Lucas couldn’t really move in this jacket, since it was almost big enough but not quite. His range of motion was extremely limited, and then his brain made the connection between ‘straitjacket’ and him being straight and wearing a jacket, and he giggled about that for a while, too, before suddenly making the bad decision to try and do some math so he could calculate when he’d need to wake up and how much sleep he’d be able to get. “Uh, I’ll do my best, but if you don’t hear from me by…” Here’s where the math came in, and he struggled to get out of the jacket and remember the result of his calculations at the same time. “…11, then I overslept, so just call me to wake me up and then start without me.”

“Oh, that one looked so cute,” Ten said. “Try the denim. By 11, huh? Isn’t that cutting it kinda close?”

“I’ll set my alarm for 10:30, but I’m not gonna get home until like… midnight thirty, so I don’t know how much sleep I’ll be able to get,” Lucas explained, picking up the jean jacket. He thought that’s what denim was, but he could also have been wrong, so he looked quickly at Ten to see his reaction. But Ten didn’t react, which meant Lucas had guessed correctly. Hell yeah!

Ten continued to not react even as Lucas shrugged into the jacket, which fit him much better in the shoulders but was too short on his waist, and after Lucas was starting to get worried about how goofy he probably looked in this fit, Ten said, “Why don’t you just spend the night?”

“What?” Lucas said, unbuttoning the jacket again since he’d been doing it up with one button misaligned. “Where? At the brunch place?!”

Ten’s lips flattened into a displeased line. “No, here,” he said when he was done being disappointed in Lucas. “That way you don’t have to wake up way early, and we can just go together.”

Lucas immediately felt so warm from how nice Ten was that he had to take the jacket back off. Honestly, all he wanted right now was to go to sleep, but if he was going back home, he’d have to wait for the night bus, catch it, walk back home, and go all the way upstairs, which would take forever. This was a much better, much easier idea, and he smiled gratefully at Ten, nodding. “Yeah, okay. Lemme call my mom and tell her so she doesn’t freak.”

“Okay,” Ten said and smiled back at him, which was unexpected and strange but also cute. He had great teeth!

Lucas got out his phone and put it on speaker so he wouldn’t have to hold it as he pulled on the final jacket, which was corduroy. The only reason Lucas knew what corduroy was was that his grandma had given him a corduroy hat for Christmas one year when he was 7 years old, and he’d worn it every day for a month, much to the dismay of everybody else in his family except his grandma. 

“Hi, I was just about to call you!” Mom said once she’d answered. “What’s shakin’?”

“Yeah, sorry, closing took forever and then I got some food,” Lucas said, zipping the jacket up and then turning to show the finished product to Ten, who gave it two teeny thumbs-up. “I’m all good, but I’m gonna sleep over at Ten’s, so don’t wait up, okay?”

“Oh!” Mom said. “Okey dokie! And then you’ll be back after brunch tomorrow?”

“Guess so,” Lucas shrugged and took off the jacket. The skin of his arms was starting to chafe from all the on-off jacket action going on, but that seemed like it had been the winner, so they were done and now he could sleeeeeep. 

“Well, have tons of fun,” Mom said in that mom-like way that she had, “and tell Ten I say hi!”

Lucas made a face at Ten, like, moms, what can ya do! “Duh,” he said. “Good night, love you.”

“Love you, good night,” Mom said back and they both hung up.

“Wow,” Ten sighed dreamily. “Vivian’s the best person alive.”

Lucas was mainly just glad that Ten hadn’t done any kind of “whoa, what are you doing? Put your pants back on!!!” phonecall foolery like Lucas would have had to fight the urge to do, even though he’d graduated middle school a long time ago (it had been a very beautiful ceremony) and had theoretically moved past that kind of humor. “She’s okay, I guess,” he shrugged, then yawned, eyes scrunching closed. 

“Go get in bed, I’ll hang all the rest of this up,” Ten said, getting up off the couch and taking the jackets from him. “Unless you wanted some tea or something.”

Tea was a very refined beverage that Lucas still didn’t quite understand people his age drinking for pleasure. Wasn’t it just boiled leaves? What was the point? Sure, his mom made him drink green tea, but that had antioxidants in it, and she was, like… 40 years old? Maybe? Honestly, Lucas didn’t know for sure how old his mom was, but the point is, she wasn’t 20, which validated her tea-drinking habits. As for Ten, he had no excuse. “Um, I’ll pass,” he said.

“I can’t believe you came over even though you were at work for _nine hours_ ,” Ten said, clucking his tongue like he was calling a horse, imitating a chicken, and other such barnyard activities. “Go lie down. Shoo.”

He shooed Lucas towards the bed, and Lucas flopped his way over there, once again stripping as he went. He’d napped naked in Ten’s bed before and Ten hadn’t had a problem with it, and Lucas didn’t really care if he slept naked or not, so it was fine. The only issue was that he tended to starfish out in his sleep, but Ten would probably be pretty bold about shoving Lucas out of his way to make enough room for himself. Hehe, now they really were going to be sleeping together, hehe. 

After getting fully nakey, Lucas slithered his way into Ten’s bed and smushed his face into a pillow. Now he was back to feeling dizzy from sleepiness, but he didn’t know if Ten was also going to sleep yet, so he didn’t let himself pass out, just turned over so he could look at Ten for now. “What time should we leave tomorrow?”

“Quarter-til? It’s barely five minutes away,” Ten said. “You’ll like my outfit a lot, I think. There’s a lot of buttons.”

Was that something Lucas liked?? Honestly, by this point, Ten probably knew better than Lucas did. So Lucas just took his word for it and nodded, snuggling up even more in Ten’s duvet and stretching out his legs. “Are you coming to bed?” 

“Yeah, just a sec,” Ten said. He was in the kitchen now, washing a couple of glasses and putting things away. “You owe me a proper sleepover, you know. With movies and talking about crushes. You can braid my hair and we’ll do facemasks.”

“Uh, okay,” Lucas said, keeping the fact that he didn’t know how to braid hair to himself. Then Ten didn’t say anything for about thirty seconds, and Lucas started drifting off despite his best efforts to keep his eyes open. Ten’s bed was super warm and Lucas, like a newborn puppy, tended to get fully knocked out the second his body temp rose half a degree, so he was fighting a losing battle, until he was startled back to consciousness again by the bed shifting and Ten wriggling into the bed next to him.

“Hey,” Ten murmured, sidling up closer to Lucas once he was fully in bed. “Are you too sleepy to fool around?”

Suddenly Lucas was wide awake! Miracles abound! “Nope,” he said eagerly, and Ten laughed very quietly and leaned in to press their lips together, his hand already making its way down Lucas’s body.

Lucas grabbed for him in return and was stoked to find that Ten was also nakey. Ten, meanwhile, was getting Lucas hard, which took about .02 seconds from start to finish, but Lucas didn’t even notice the rush of blood downstairs since he’d already been dizzy in the first place. Ten was just so good, at _everything_ , and once Lucas was hard and juiced up, activated like an almond, Ten pressed even closer to him, fitting his sneaky evil mouth to Lucas’s neck and slinging one leg up over him to really seal the deal.

It was dirty, fast, and easy, since Lucas hadn’t had time to jerk off before work like he usually did, and it was all over pretty soon, Ten kissing Lucas through his moans as the bites on Lucas’s neck stung and tingled. And he expected that to be the end of it — he was passing out _fast_ , less conscious by the second — after Ten came, too, with Lucas’s big mitts holding onto his thighs and back, but Ten wasn’t letting go yet, gripping Lucas’s jaw with one hand to keep him still as he licked into his mouth.

Normally the vibe was that “they were kissing,” but right now Ten was definitely just kissing Lucas, tonguing him and sucking at his lips and nibbling along the outline of his mouth, and Lucas couldn’t do a whole lot about it, held very motionless as Ten had his way. “Sleepy?” Ten breathed into his mouth, his other hand petting over Lucas’s shoulders and his ribs. 

Lucas tried to nod but his brain and body were going through a painful, complicated divorce, never mind the custody agreement negotiations. So he just kind of lay there, sluglike, and made a soft noise that he figured Ten would understand meant yeah, he was super duper sleepy, so maybe it was time to stop kissing and go to sleep instead?

But Ten either didn’t understand or didn’t care, because he kept kissing him and petting him, tugging at Lucas’s slack lips with his teeth and doing all sorts of weird shit like licking the tendons under his tongue. Lucas was just some Silly Putty disintegrating slowly in the sun that Ten kept poking to see what would happen, and he couldn’t even kiss back much and it felt so nice but he couldn’t do anything about it. He made that noise again, whinier this time, and Ten just cooed at him, his one hand still holding Lucas’s jaw and the other now petting through his hair.

Whenever they played tonsil hockey, Lucas did usually feel like he was going to pass out from the way Ten kissed him, but he’d never expected it to literally happen; at this rate Ten was going to kiss him to sleep. He kept whining, grumpy and sleepy and feeling way too good, and finally Ten started slowing down, downgrading from full-on Frenching to just small, firm pecks like he was a bird and Lucas was some particularly gourmet birdseed. “I’ll leave you alone if you spoon me,” he offered. “Deal?”

But he didn’t move away, instead just slipped his slippery little arms around Lucas’s neck and hugged onto him. Lucas had spooned before, more than once, even, and although he wouldn’t consider himself an expert, he was certainly very experienced, so he was pretty sure this wasn’t what it was; as usual, though, the TV receiver of his brain was set to the WHITE NOISE - BASS BOOSTED - 10 HRS. NONSTOP channel, and he was unable to voice his concerns. This was good, too, though, until Ten nipped at Lucas’s neck right over a hickey and Lucas whined very weakly yet again, knocking his head against Ten’s to make him back off. 

“Sorry, _sorry_ , you’re just so— gah,” Ten said. He smooched Lucas wetly one more time, then flipped over so they could spoon.

Lucas attached to him as immediately as he could given that his limbs were currently full of a gross mixture of organic honey and coarse sand, putting one leg between Ten’s and draping a big heavy arm over him, and he hugged Ten close. He was losing the ability to think in full sentences, so his stream of consciousness was just “Warm… sleeby… Fortnite… brunch… Ten = sexy… zzzz…” until the beaver of sleep finished building its dam on said stream, and Lucas zonked the fuck out.

And hoo boy, Lucas did often have pretty sexy dreams, but something about sleeping in Ten’s bed with actual Ten in his arms made everything way worse. Nothing came to any actual conclusion, thank fuck, but he spent the night tormented by visions of freaky improbable mid-air screwing, some weird subplot where Ten had a huge prize-winning collection of fleshlights, some other even weirder subplot involving a whole bunch of mirrors. Weird stuff! In the night, Lucas and Ten shifted positions from spooning to their usual Lucas-as-a-second-mattress layout, Ten’s head pillowed on Lucas’s shoulder, one arm and one leg thrown over his body. Maybe that was why Lucas’s caveman sex brain was working overtime, because all of Ten was right there, his thigh pressed right on Lucas’s dick all night long. 

What finally did the trick was when Lucas started waking up; Ten had turned his head so his hair would be tickling right under Lucas’s ear, and the small movement was enough to make Lucas very, very slowly start to regain consciousness. Ten had opted to keep the bed in the corner where Lucas had moved it to last time, but he’d obviously been too lazy/gay to install the blackout curtains without Lucas’s help, so sunlight was slicing through the blinds and attacking Lucas’s poor defenseless face. He groaned, trying to turn his face away, and his noise made Ten stir a little, too, his hips and body shifting on top of Lucas.

Lucas groaned again, but for a different reason. Somehow when he’d entered into this whole fooling around with a guy thing, he hadn’t considered that waking up together meant two morning woods to deal with or cold shower away, not just one, but now here he was, armful of boy, pressed together almost dick to dick. Gaaaay. Lucas himself was so hard and his skin felt sticky from sweat and precum in the various places where he and Ten were sealed together. Honestly, he was a little uncomfortable, and his sleepy clumsy hands tried to move Ten away so his thigh wouldn’t be pressed so directly right into Lucas’s boner, but that backfired horribly when Ten just sighed erotically, his face rubbing against Lucas’s neck and his thigh dragging _so_ fucking perfectly against Lucas’s morning wood.

They were both so warm and Ten’s body, with the exception of his dick, was so soft. Lucas yawned into Ten’s hair, his hands rubbing slowly down his back to his butt and then back up just to feel how silky-soft he was. Everything felt good, like even just the contact of skin to palm was orgasmic, and his hips rocked up without him even thinking about it, just chasing the feeling. 

Ten snuffled a sleepy noise, nuzzling deeper into him, small fingers flexing against his chest. “Lucas,” he whispered, his voice barely comprehensible from how croaky and breathy and small it was, “are you awake?”

His breath tickled the fuck out of Lucas’s neck and Lucas shivered, his dick twitching between them. “Not yet,” he rasped back, his palms dragging down Ten’s body again. 

Ten hummed quietly, rubbing his face into Lucas’s neck yet again, squirming his hips down onto Lucas’s to get more comfortable. “Go back to sleep, baby.”

“Can’t,” Lucas mumbled through another yawn, stretching as much of his body as he could with Ten clinging onto him. The stretch made his muscles ache in the second-best possible way, and the movement had made their bodies rub together in the first-best possible way.

Ten shivered, too, finally. This time the noise he made when Lucas’s hands went over him starting from the nape of his neck and then down was more like a mewl, small and sleepy and needy as he squirmed. “Lucas…” He really sounded barely conscious, and had Lucas been able to string enough words together to say a snappy comeback 8 hours too late, he’d have said something about Ten getting a taste of his own medicine for the way he’d been treating Lucas last night, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t, just tilted his head down to nestle into the top of Ten’s hair.

Then he almost did fall back asleep, until Ten got restless and wriggled off of him, curling up on his side again instead, primed for another round of spooning. Lucas moved with him, arm draped over his side, hips pressed snug, and his palm splayed out over Ten’s warm stomach. 

Ten did that mewly thing again, nestling back against Lucas. The way he moved made his ass press literally directly against Lucas’s already-hard dick, and Lucas pressed his face into the back of Ten’s pointy flat shoulder as he pushed his hips forward to keep that friction going. 

Fuck, that felt so good, and his body was sort of moving on its own, rocking lazily against Ten’s ass and the small of his back. Ten was moving, too, squirming backwards and huffing out fast warm open-mouthed breaths, but Lucas wanted him even closer, so he dragged his drowsy hand down Ten’s body to slip between his legs and hold on the inside of his thigh to hike him backwards. 

Ten whimpered, his body twitching, and he was even warmer where Lucas was touching, practically feverish. Lucas’s dick, in the meantime, clumsy from the fact that it was too early in the morning for Lucas Jr. to find his usual sentience, was poking around somewhere between Ten’s thighs, and Lucas moaned at the feeling, his hand coming back out from Ten’s legs to palm up his stomach and his chest, just rubbing him in a warm, friendly sort of way while he pressed his face to the side/back of Ten’s neck.

Ten arched his back and squirmed harder, his moan going all squeaky when he yawned in the middle. “Lucas,” he pouted, wriggling out of Lucas’s hold on him to turn over another time, nestled into Lucas’s front instead. “Whyyyyy.”

Lucas never had answers to such complicated questions, but Ten didn’t seem to really want one, just snuggling up closer to him and gasping into his shoulder when his dick bumped against Lucas’s hip. 

“You feel so good,” Lucas rumbled, voice so morning-crackly he could barely understand himself, and shifted onto his back, very lazily helping Ten get back on top of him again. 

Ten sighed out a soft, high noise, settling where Lucas moved him, their legs slotted together. He fucked his hips down and they both shuddered, sparks shooting through Lucas’s body and Lucas’s dick, and Ten dropped his head onto the pillow so he wouldn’t have to hold it up anymore. He was breathing right against Lucas’s face, and Lucas turned to nuzzle into him, trying to press a kiss to his neck but somehow missing completely and ending up tonguing sloppily over his ear instead. It was early enough and Ten was probably sleepy enough that that actually felt good, because Ten whimpered again and tilted his head to offer more of himself up for the licking, and Lucas was like a jellyfish drifting through the sea, going exclusively off impulse and completely lacking a brain, so he sucked on his earlobe for a minute, tongue pressing curiously at the stud of one of his earrings, the cold metal in his hot mouth making little pop rocks of sensation spark all the way down his spine and back up into the space where his brain would have been if he weren’t such a jellyfish. Ten really liked it, quivering as if _he_ was the jellyfish, not Lucas, and so Lucas kept going, lazily tonguing over his earring and nibbling at his earlobe with clumsy lips.

By now, they were grinding together pretty rhythmically, scissoring like lesbians. Lucas didn’t know how much time had passed, his eyes were closed to protect his delicate eyes from the sun, and everything still felt fucking amazing, and it only got better when Ten moved over to kiss him full on the mouth. Now Lucas could actually kiss him back, so he did, their kisses wet and smacky and messy, and Ten’s hand was petting over Lucas’s torso now and settling at the base of his neck. 

It just felt better and better, Lucas’s body somehow tense and loose at the same time, like he was scratching a really intense itch or about to sneeze. The space between their bodies was getting wetter and stickier as they kept moving, and Ten kept kissing him, sucking at his lips and moaning quietly when Lucas licked at him in return. Lucas wasn’t thinking anything, just feeling, just moving when Ten did, and Ten was so warm, wrapped all around Lucas and still whimpering very softly. Every time their bodies moved just right and their dicks bumped together, Ten shuddered, trying to tighten his thighs around Lucas’s leg or just press his legs together and ending up just squirming and panting hot into Lucas’s mouth.

Lucas had never even done this with a girl before, but honestly, now he wanted to try it. But he didn’t see how it could get much better than this, and he kept gasping against the side of Ten’s mouth as Ten squirmed on top of him, his fingers flexing and twitching over Lucas’s neck and shoulders. He was just so pretty, everything he did, all his movements lazy and sexy and helpless, and Lucas could feel that he was getting closer but he didn’t even care, too busy pawing over Ten and kissing him and grinding their bodies together. His hand kept running down to sort of knead at Ten’s ass, and every time he did that, Ten made a needy little noise and rubbed his body on Lucas’s even more. 

He was making so many noises overall — both of them were — or maybe Lucas was hallucinating because he was so sleepy. Lucas couldn’t be bothered to be quiet, and fuck Ten’s neighbors (not literally!!!). This was too good, and each time Ten fucked his hips down against Lucas’s, Lucas moaned, thrusting up to meet him. 

Ten was squiggling around on top of him and panting squeaky, raspy breaths into Lucas’s lower lip, and Lucas’s hands pulled Ten closer so he could get a better angle. “What— what were you dreaming about?” Ten whispered.

“You,” Lucas yawned, nuzzling his face against Ten’s while he was too busy yawning to kiss. “Sex stuff.”

“Hah,” Ten gasped very quietly and clung onto him. “Me too.”

Lucas mmm’d in response, out of words for now but he definitely wanted to know more later, and nudged their mouths together. He also scratched one hand lightly down Ten’s back, and Ten moaned, still hoarse and sleepy, and shivered. Lucas, still going on instinct, eyes not even open, took a cue from Ten and pressed his legs together as much as he could with them in this position, ending up locking Ten’s leg in between his own. 

They were completely fused together by now, sweaty and too warm, and Lucas tilted his head back so Ten could lick into him better. A low, drowsy noise came all the way up from his chest, and Ten echoed him with a little purr of his own. And then, kind of unexpectedly, Ten came, and Lucas didn’t even know what he’d done right, he hadn’t even meant to; one second, Ten was pressing down on him and Lucas was seeing stars behind his closed eyelids, and the next, he was twitching and shuddering in Lucas’s hold, getting both their stomachs slippery. He kept kissing Lucas through it, his breath huffing high and fast through his nose and his legs squirming around like they had a life of their own (Lucas wouldn’t have been surprised, they were so powerful!).

Not long after that, for once in Lucas’s horny life, he already felt so beyond good that him coming was barely even an Event; Ten’s tongue was in his mouth the whole time and Lucas moaned, his hips shuddering up and his dick throbbing and his whole body fizzling and sizzling. He felt buzzed, and he flattened Ten on top of him even more, wrapping his arms around him and hugging him tight.

Then they just got back to kissing, Ten wriggling until he was all the way on top of Lucas, not halfway, and then they just sucked face for a while, breathing into each other’s mouths and slowly cooling down.

After what could literally have been about fifteen years, Lucas plunger’d himself away. “Time’s it?”

“I don’t know,” Ten sighed, shimmying down their bodies to rest his head on Lucas’s pec. “Mm, good morning.”

“HEY SIRI WHAT TIME IS IT,” Lucas said at full volume and Ten hissed, the soft little hand he’d had resting on Lucas’s chest by his own face suddenly turning into a claw of death and leaving Lucas wincing as his nails dug in. 

“It’s 11:44 AM,” Siri said, and Ten said “FUCK!” and rolled off of Lucas, the cum that had been unfortunately congealing between their bodies gooping sort of unpleasantly in his wake. 

“Why didn’t you set an alarm?” Lucas said, confused, and sat up slowly. 

“Because we went to bed so early! I thought it’d be fine!” Ten said, but instead of just leaping out of bed to go tornado around the apartment and get dressed, he pressed in close to give Lucas a toe-curlingly good kiss, _then_ leapt out of bed. 

Lucas rubbed some sleep out of his eyes and watched Ten’s ass as he swished over to his closet. “Uh, you wanna text him and say we’re gonna be late?”

“No, it’s fine, I just hate that he’s right about me,” Ten huffed. “But I can’t _not_ be fashionably late. I’m too fashionable! I can’t help it!” He was in the middle of pulling on what could only have been described as a blouse, and Lucas only shopped at Old Navy most of the time, so he was just gonna have to take his word for it. 

Mainly Lucas was just disoriented at the sudden loss of Ten, who’d been so warm and snuggly and sexy, and he’d also just decided that morning sex was his new top-three fave thing in life. Filling out the list, nice. He very gradually removed his legs, then the rest of his body, from the bed and stood up, making a face at how crusty and icky he once again felt thanks to his morning breath and the cum on his stomach. Life comes at you fast: one minute you can be in bed with some amazing twink all over you, and the next you’re just wobbling around naked and chilly and late to brunch, and also your mouth tastes like garbage.

He stumbled past Ten, absentmindedly reaching out to rub a friendly hand down Ten’s back as he went by, and into the kitchen, wiping his tummy off with a wet paper towel and then gargling his mouth out with tap water. Ten had started watching him at some point with the same sort of facial expression he might have if he’d seen a baby about to stick a fork into a power outlet, but he didn’t say anything, just kept getting dressed.

Lucas scrubbed his face in cold water for good measure, then enthusiastically shook his head from side to side to get all the droplets out of his hair. “Uh, Ten?” he said. “I don’t have anything to wear. The outfit I was gonna wear is at my house.”

Ten turned his head backwards what looked like a whole 180 degrees to stare at him, and without breaking eye contact, walked very slowly over to the wardrobe he had against his wall. He opened the door and gestured grandly to an entire clothing rack chock-full of just Lucas’s shirts, and Lucas went, “Oh, yeah, throwback,” and came over to pick one out.

“No, not that one, then we’ll clash,” Ten said, curling up against Lucas’s back. “And that stripy one is cute, but you’re already gonna be wearing corduroy, that’s stripes on stripes.”

Jeez. Ten had so many rules. Lucas tried one last time and picked a regular white tee, glancing back over his shoulder at Ten, and Ten nodded approvingly, stretching all the way up as far as he could humanly go on his tippy-tippy toes to kiss the back of Lucas’s neck. “Hurry up,” he said, then smacked Lucas’s ass!

Lucas yelped, jumping half a foot into the air from shock and offense at being treated like a piece of meat! Ten sure had a mean swing, and now his buns stung! “Hello?????” he said, for lack of anything better to say, and Ten just shrugged, smiling cutely up at him.

“Salutations,” he said, and drew Lucas down for another little kiss. “Why aren’t you dressed yet?”

“You’re not, either,” Lucas pointed out, taking Ten by the waist and sliding his hands down to demonstrate, kissing him again in the meantime. “We’re gonna be so late.”

Ten sighed, leaning against him. “So what?” he breathed, his hands resting on Lucas’s shoulders. Lucas pulled Ten closer, his arms wrapping around his slippery body, and Ten tilted his head to the side so the kiss could get deeper, and they stood there like that for a while until Ten’s phone rang and he pulled away from Lucas, scowling very resentfully at Lucas, who had never done anything wrong in his life and didn’t deserve such treatment!

“Okay, okay, yikes,” Lucas said and pulled his boxers and jeans from yesterday back on. No belt, and he didn’t dare risk Ten/Tan’s French tuck, so he just put the corduroy jacket on top and declared himself perfect as Ten went over to answer the call (Ghostbusters!). 

“Headed out now,” Ten said into the phone, exasperated. “What, like you two can’t find something to keep yourselves busy for the next eight to twelve minutes? Give me a break.” Meanwhile he was gesturing to Lucas like a SWAT agent to go for the door, and Lucas nodded, shuffling towards the exit and snagging his shoes along the way. 

Ten hung up the phone after some more snippy little snaps, and then he joined Lucas by the door. Somehow in the thirty seconds that Lucas hadn’t been looking at him, he’d finished getting dressed, and he sure had been right about his outfit: there were a _lot_ of buttons, and Lucas liked it very much. 

“Wow,” he said in the exact same tone of voice he’d used when his prom date had come out of her house wearing a teal dress from Nordstrom that was about three feet too long for her. “You look… great.”

“I know, right?” Ten said coyly and leaned up to kiss him. Lucas made a happy noise and grabbed him by his waist again, feeling how soft the fabric of his shirt was. “Come _on_ , we have places to be.”

He didn’t push him away, though, and they kept kissing, Ten’s arms winding around Lucas’s shoulders. Lucas suddenly had a very intense flashback to this one time he’d been at a movie theater seeing The Amazing Spider-man (starring Andrew Garfield, Lucas rated it 4.5 out of 5 stars) and he’d been sitting next to some old dude sexting. One of the most traumatic experience of Lucas’s life, because he’d had his text set on HUGE and they’d been exchanging wrinkly nudes. But one of the last texts Lucas got a look at just said _How am I going to keep my hands to myself at brunch?_ and all of a sudden, Lucas understood! Back then, he hadn’t even known what brunch was, but now he sure did, and now he even had someone he couldn’t keep his hands off of at brunch! Amazing!

“I do like this outfit,” he mumbled into Ten’s mouth, bundling Ten up closer in his arms until Ten squeaked from being squished so tight, pulling weakly at Lucas’s hair to make him ease up. Lucas loosened his hold a little and kissed Ten again, mostly on autopilot since he’d had such a sexy wake-up and therefore was all out of whack in terms of his morning routine. “Are you tricking me into going on a double date?”

“Oh, the other shoe finally dropped,” Ten said, smiling, and Lucas almost started looking down to see if one of Ten’s shoes had literally fallen off before he got that, too. 

He’d been on a couple double dates before with girlfriends and they’d all been a little awkward but not too cringe, so he figured he may as well go on one with Ten, who was… definitely not his girlfriend! Anyways, he’d be able to handle this!

Meanwhile back at the ranch, things were starting to get a little out of hand, or rather _in_ hand, as it were; Lucas had progressed to groping Ten’s ass. “What if,” he said between kisses, cracking one eye open to look at the bed, “we… were… _really_ late to brunch?”

“Nymphomania is a serious condition, Lucas, you should really ask a doctor about it,” Ten said sternly and pulled away from him. Or tried to, but Lucas’s hands were determined to hold on and he didn’t want to let Ten go, so Ten just giggled and thumped one dainty itsy-bitsy hand against Lucas’s chest. “We have all day to fool around, we just have to get this out of the way first. Look—”

“Uh huh,” Lucas said, trying to lean in for another kiss, and Ten giggled again and turned his face away. Lucas settled for kissing down his jaw to his neck, and Ten sighed, pulling Lucas’s hair and twirling it around his fingers.

“Look,” he tried again, “if we go now, I’ll let you have some of my mimosa.” He paused and thought about this, chewing his lower lip. God, Lucas wished that were him biting on Ten’s lip, but Ten was being uncharacteristically homophobic and not letting Lucas kiss him! “No, maybe I want a Bellini, and you can’t have any of that. Ugh. I’ll just get you a Bloody Mary.” 

Lucas was pretty sure Ten was talking about alcohol, and although Lucas didn’t know anything about brunch, he knew a fair amount about vodka. “Fine,” he grumbled, letting go of Ten and opening the door for them both. 

“Hang on,” Ten said, having managed to vanish even though Lucas had only been distracted for maybe five seconds. 

“Wah,” Lucas said sadly, and Ten somehow popped back into existence while Lucas was mid-blink. Lucas was very startled by Ten’s teleportation abilities, then chilled out again and looked at him more closely. He looked just a little different, but Lucas had always been super shitty at those ‘spot the difference’ games, so he gave up the search and fiddled with his jacket as Ten grabbed his keys and swooshed out the door. 

When they were out on the street, Ten and Lucas both made disgruntled noises about how sunny it was, then Ten grabbed Lucas by the arm and tugged him to the left. “It’s only a couple blocks, thank fuck, these shoes are so uncomfortable,” he muttered.

“Then why’d you wear them?” Lucas asked, confused. He looked down and saw that they were freaky-deeky pointy black boots, pointier and darker than any Lucas had ever seen outside of Spirit Halloween. 

“Why do I ever do anything? For the aesthetic, of course,” Ten sighed, leaning his head on Lucas’s arm as they walked. “Do you like my lip gloss?”

Oh, that was why he looked different. Lucas tilted his head down to peer at it, and nodded approvingly. “Sparkly,” he said.

Ten duckface’d out his lips at him to show it off some more, then before Lucas could react, hopped up and gave Lucas a sticky kiss on the cheek. “Now we match,” he said. “Don’t let Yuta scare you, okay? And if you don’t know what something on the menu is, you can ask me.”

Lucas scoffed, resisting the urge to scratch the side of his face where the lip gloss was making his skin feel all funky. “I’m _definitely_ gonna be able to understand the menu. Remember when I was a star waiter for, like, a month? I know fancy foods! You’ll see!” But he didn’t deny that he was scared of Yuta, though. 

“Sure, honey,” Ten said blandly, and Lucas’s jimmies were so rustled by this that he forgot all about what they’d been talking about and just sort of stumbled helplessly after Ten, tongue-tied, blushing, and sparkly-cheeked. His cheek was kind of tingling, actually, and he was beginning to suspect he was a little allergic to something in Ten’s lip gloss, but meh! 

As they approached the brunch place and nearly got hit by several cars since Ten was a ruthless jaywalker who feared neither God nor death, Ten’s phone started ringing again and he ignored it, instead choosing to reach up and thumb at the kiss mark on Lucas’s cheek instead. “Do you want to sit next to me or across from me? Decide now, so I can make Yuta move if I have to.”

“Why wouldn’t I sit next to you?” Lucas said, super confused, and Ten smiled, rubbing his face in Lucas’s corduroyed arm. He still felt like they hadn’t really finished what they’d started this morning, so sitting opposite Ten, even though it had the potential for playing footsie to the extent that both of them would end up with bruised shins, seemed like a bad and weird idea, and he pouted about it. 

“Turn that frown upside down,” Ten cooed, poking at Lucas’s mouth with his cold little hand. “Seriously, start smiling or they’ll think I kidnapped you.”

Lucas smiled on command, more nervous about whatever weird gay cult shit was about to go down with each second that passed, and Ten frowned disapprovingly.

“No, I said _smile_ ,” he said. “What is that? That’s not how your mouth is supposed to work. Stop it.”

Lucas tried again, and Ten sighed, then clearly decided it would have to do and gestured to the door. Lucas stopped trying to smile and opened the door for him, looking around for a purple head once they got inside. He couldn’t see him, though, and glanced down at Ten to see if maybe he was texting Yuta to ask where they were. But Ten was still just leaning his head against Lucas’s arm, blinking up at him with his big baby eyes. “What?” Lucas said, blinking back. “Do I have something on my face?”

“No, you just smell like me,” Ten said, and Lucas went pink.

“Well, yeah, I’m wearing your stuff and I used your shampoo,” he mumbled. “Uh, by the way, what conditioner do you use?”

Ten said some garbled word that may or may not have been a conditioner brand but was definitely not in any human language Lucas had ever heard before. “But you can borrow it whenever you want, obviously,” he added. “It was kind of expensive.”

Lucas nodded, lifting his free hand to pat the top of Ten’s head so he could feel how soft his hair was, as usual. “It’s nice.”

Ten tilted his head to encourage Lucas to keep touching, and he smiled, biting his lip just a little bit. Lucas could tell by now when he was being flirted with, and his dick was still early-morning confused; Ten was on dangerous ground here! “They haven’t seen us yet,” he said very quietly, and Lucas had to lean way down to be able to hear him better. “We could just leave and say we couldn’t come because you suddenly developed a phobia of avocado toast.”

“First of all, why would you ever ruin toast by putting avocados on it,” Lucas said, appalled, then calmed down real quick when he fully understood what Ten meant. “Okay, let’s do it.”

Ten’s eyes twinkled and he was about to pull away and go for the door when his phone rang again and he rolled his eyes, very tragically and melodramatically pulling away from Lucas. But he couldn’t keep a straight face for long (or ever! Because he was gay!) and started giggling again, taking Lucas by the wrist and hauling him deeper into the restaurant. “Now who’s a nympho,” he sighed. 

“Um… still me?” Lucas guessed. “Wait, no. You?”

“I think both of us at this point,” Ten said. His grip was so tight on Lucas’s wrist, and Lucas was mainly just trying not to bump into anyone or anything, scurrying along after Ten and trying to keep his various limbs in check. “Oh, there they are.”

Gulp! Ten was raising his free hand to wave, and Lucas was still mostly hidden behind Ten, even though Ten was about 2 feet tall and the top of Lucas’s head was practically hitting the ceiling. But Lucas peeked out from around him and saw Yuta — purple-haired as ever — sitting next to some other dude. 

What had Ten described the apple guy as? “Normal?” The closer they got to the table, the more Lucas could see that yeah, he looked super normal. It checked out. What _didn’t_ look normal, though, was the expression on Yuta’s face. He looked… okay?? Happy????? Something was seriously very wrong, and Lucas was very, very afraid.

“Sorry we’re late,” Ten said breezily, tip-tapping his pointy-booted way over to sit in the chair across from Yuta. “We lost track of time.”

Yuta looked away from his cinnamon apple (Lucas still had no idea what that meant or what his name actually was) and up at Ten and Lucas, evidently seeing how glowy and post-orgasmic they were. Lucas swallowed nervously, gaytimidated by Yuta’s energies and ready for some mean comment, but Yuta just said, “That’s okay, we haven’t been here all that long! It’s good to see you, Lucas!”

Lucas’s eyes bugged out of his head and he forgot that he had to sit down, only remembering when Ten yanked sharply at the hem of his corduroy jacket and he sort of fell down into his chair. “Huh? I mean, uh, you too!”

“This is Sicheng,” Yuta added, glowing even harder than Ten and Lucas combined. Lucas realized with a jolt that they were holding hands on top of the table, and Yuta sure was smiling a lot, which was why he looked so extra uncanny-valley. “My boyfriend.”

“Hey,” Sicheng said in a super deep voice. It was so deep that at first Lucas thought maybe he was doing it as a joke, but Lucas’s sort of nervous laugh didn’t get any kind of response, so maybe he literally did just sound like that? Since apparently he was really normal. And he really did seem to be, except he also looked exactly like _some_ kind of animal, a cute one, and Lucas couldn’t for the life of him figure out what animal it was. Fuck, now he wasn’t going to be able to pay attention to brunch, he’d be too busy trying to solve that mystery!

“How are you?” Ten smiled, while passing a menu to Lucas. “When was the last time I saw you, my summer solstice party?”

“I think so,” Sicheng said. “I’m good, I’ve just been working a lot.”

“Well, you know he’s general manager now,” Yuta added, beaming. “So I never get to see him—” He reached up with his free hand and pinched Sicheng’s cheek, pouting and cooing sort of like Ten did with Lucas except a zillion times more horrible— “but at least he buys me cardigans!”

Sicheng and Lucas made eye contact and Lucas said, “Uh, where do you work?”

“Abercrombie,” Sicheng said with a casual shrug. 

And suddenly everything made sense! Well, Yuta browsing through the Abercrombie website made sense (although why would he be shopping at Abercrombie himself if his boyfriend worked there? Couldn’t Sicheng just get him stuff? It’s not like Yuta needed to buy Sicheng more Abercrombie. Never mind, maybe this didn’t make sense after all). Definitely nothing else made sense, though, and Lucas’s world was spiraling out of control every time Yuta smiled at Sicheng like the sun shone out of his ass. He was just a normal dude! And that literally had to have been a body double of Yuta, or a less evil clone! What was going on!!! Lucas tried to remember the plot of _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ but kept coming up empty, and wondered how he could sneakily pull up the Wikipedia page without getting caught.

“Should we order?” Yuta asked the table at large, even smiling at Lucas, and Lucas busied himself with the menu, confused and feeling like he was going to get killed by the end of this meal. 

“Last chance if you want me to pick for you,” Ten murmured to Lucas, and that managed to startle Lucas out of his confused stupor.

He frowned at him and opened the menu to see their brunch selections. “I can do it,” he protested quietly. “I’ll have the—”

Actually, he didn’t know for sure what a single damn thing on this menu was. Eggs benedict? He knew what eggs were, but not benedicts. Avocado toast was a no-go for obvious reasons. Pancakes he was very familiar with, and yet these pancakes came with a kumquat compote, which was just ???. Even the açai bowls were unfamiliar; Lucas’s mom made them for him a lot, but they only ever had blueberries and granola in them, not pepitas and tarragon. “Ugh,” he said very sadly.

Ten bit his lip to keep from laughing and comfortingly put his hand on Lucas’s thigh under the table. Lucas’s dick did the dick equivalent of perking its ears up, and Lucas blushed, fumbling to toss his napkin onto his lap just in case Ten kept his hand there. “Their fried quail and waffles is pretty good,” Ten said. “You can even get it with a sunny-side-up quail egg on top. Adorbs, right?”

Lucas nodded miserably, then looked at the menu again and suddenly zeroed in on something even a little understandable. “Oh? Monkey bread?” He’d never heard of the dish itself before, but. “Two of my favorite things: monkeys and bread. I’ll get that!”

“Um, what? Okay,” Ten said, smiling, and patted Lucas’s thigh. Lucas side-eyed him, then tentatively put his hand on Ten’s leg in return. Ten had been sitting with his knees apart and his posture slinky and comfy, but after Lucas grabbed his thigh, he closed his legs and sat up straighter and Lucas snickered.

“Winwin, will you order for both of us? I just like hearing your voice,” Yuta was saying, and Lucas’s snicker died out faster than the dinosaurs post-meteor.

Sicheng shrugged normally. “Sure. You’ll have to order your own drink, though, I left my ID at home.”

“Oh, no,” Yuta cooed, squeezing Sicheng’s hand and rolling it back and forth on the tabletop. “You and your babyface.” 

Sicheng just shrugged again, and Lucas tried to figure out if he did have a babyface or not. He mostly just had puffy lips and a normal, mystery animal-looking face otherwise, and one pointy ear and one normal ear, which only made him look more like the mystery animal that Lucas still couldn’t figure out, God damn it.

But dude. What was Yuta’s deal? Why was he being so cutesy and bubbly? The only other time Lucas had met Yuta, Yuta had been literally so mean and scary, and that had only been a few weeks ago! It was a little concerning! He wanted to ask Ten what was going on, maybe there was something he wasn’t understanding, but then a waitress came to take their orders, so he didn’t get the chance.

Once that was over with and they’d been brought some ice waters, Yuta stopped fiddling with the collar of Sicheng’s shirt and looked over at Lucas, who instinctively shrank back in terror. “How’s Target?”

“Oh, don’t ask, he’s traumatized,” Ten laughed.

“You work at Target?” Sicheng said. “That’s cool.”

Somehow, that was the nicest thing Lucas had heard in days, so he blushed again. “Yeah, thanks! I’m in college so it’s not a real job but it’s pretty fun except for— it’s pretty fun!”

“He walked in on his managers making out,” Ten explained while Lucas continued blushing. 

“ _No_. Kun?” Yuta said, sounding more like his old self, and Ten nodded gleefully. “You poor boy! Now imagine what it was like for Ten to actually be the one making out with—”

“Stop, he’ll have an aneurysm,” Ten scolded, petting Lucas’s thigh as Lucas choked into his glass of water. 

Yuta rolled his eyes, continuing to look more like the Mr. Grumble version of himself Lucas had already met. “Did you tell him about what happened last week?”

“Ugh, no, I didn’t want to freak him out even more,” Ten said. Once again, Lucas felt kind of embarrassed but also kind of happy about being talked about like he wasn’t even there, and he perked back up, looking at Ten.

“Why? What happened?” he asked, giving Ten’s thigh a little squeeze to encourage him to talk, and Ten coughed and tried to squirm away in his chair. 

“Well, Yuta and I went out for drinks at this gay bar downtown, and— you remember our manager at Coup de Fuck, that Johnny guy?”

It took Lucas a minute to connect a name to a face, but he did vaguely remember, yeah. “Uh, I guess?”

“He was there,” Ten said, leaning an elbow on the table and sighing. “Which was bad enough on its own. But then he actually spotted me, and he bought me a drink and apologized for firing us, and then he started hitting on me!”

“Yikes,” Sicheng said in his super-low voice and laughed. 

“Wait, _Johnny?”_ Lucas repeated, shook. Now that he was thinking about it harder, all he could remember about Johnny was that he wore a bolo tie for no reason and ate plain Greek yogurt during morning employee meetings. “Ew!”

“I know, right? I was so insulted! Like, as _if!”_ Ten said, shuddering. “Yuta had to hold me back from throwing my drink in his face, but it was a free daiquiri, like. What was I gonna do, say no?”

“It was a little like that time we were on a date,” Yuta added to Sicheng, his voice suddenly super soft and mushy like an overripe banana, “at that dumpling place, and your ex-girlfriend was there, too, remember?”

“Yeah,” Sicheng said, shaking his head a little. “Weird.”

Oh, okay, an ex-girlfriend. Valid. There was a semi-awkward silence and Lucas accidentally made eye contact with Sicheng again, and out of the corner of his vision he could see Yuta very gently elbowing Sicheng until Sicheng sighed and nodded. 

“I’m bi,” Sicheng added robotically. 

The semi-awkward silence went from a semi to a full chub. Lucas took a sip of his ice water. Ten, Yuta, and Sicheng were all looking at him very intensely and nobody was blinking, so Lucas blinked a few times to make up for it. “Uh, okay?” he finally said, since it seemed like everybody was waiting for him to say something. “Like my pal Jaemin.”

“WHO?” Ten said, scooting his chair closer to Lucas’s. “You have a bi friend? What? Who? Is he cute?”

“He’s our pitcher,” Lucas explained, confused about why this was such a big deal, “and we have this inside joke about how he plays for both teams. It’s a great way to psych out the competition. We still suck, though, but maybe someday it’ll work and we’ll actually win a game.”

“Wow,” Yuta said, looking at Ten, who was scooting his chair even closer.

“Is he cute?” Ten asked again more insistently, but Lucas didn’t get the chance to answer, because then their waitress came back with their drinks (two mimosas for Yuta and Ten, a black coffee for Sicheng, and a root beer float (breakfast drink of champions!) for Lucas). 

“Should we toast?” Yuta suggested, raising his glass and beaming at Sicheng again. 

“I don’t know why you’re looking at me, I’m not making any speeches,” Sicheng said, and Yuta laughed like Sicheng had said the funniest thing ever said by anyone who’d ever been alive on this shit earth, gently batting at his arm with one hand and practically shooting heart-eyes at him. He really did look like the heart-eye emoji! It was wack!

“Cheers,” Ten said, very gently clinking his glass against Lucas’s. “Do you want to try some?”

“What’s in it?” Lucas said dubiously, sipping his root beer float. 

“Champagne and orange juice,” Ten said. “How have you never seen a mimosa before?”

“Does Vivian not make them?” Yuta asked, and Lucas glanced over to him really sharply, shocked that he dared to speak her name.

“Uh, she… I don’t think so?” he said, squinting confusedly. “How do you know about my mom?”

“Ten told our groupchat all about the meet-and-greet,” Yuta explained, and even Sicheng looked like he was amused. 

Groupchat? Oh, no. Lucas was in a couple of groupchats himself, and some of the girls he’d hooked up with at college had mentioned groupchats, and Lucas knew that that was serious business. But also— “You talk about me?” he asked Ten, as confused by that as anything else.

“Does he _ever_ ,” Yuta laughed as Ten pretended not to hear, sipping on his mimosa. “We had to kick him out a couple times because all he did was talk about your c—”

There was a muffled thump from under the table and Yuta made a pained noise and scooted his chair back, out of kicking range. “I just told them about how great Vivian is, that’s all,” Ten said coolly. 

“She is great,” Lucas agreed, but he still didn’t know what was going on. Luckily, within another five seconds, a distraction came in the form of a plate of monkey bread set in front of him: it turned out to be a pastry thing covered in sugar and syrup! Fuck yes! Although Lucas was kind of disappointed that it wasn’t monkey-shaped, but nobody’s perfect.

“Big portion,” Ten commented, then, “Oh, _god_ ,” as Lucas dug in and ate about half of it in one fell swoop. “You were that hungry? I have snacks at my place, you should have said!”

“NBD,” Lucas tried to say with his mouth full. Ten just sighed and sipped his mimosa again.

Across the table from him, Sicheng was very politely cutting into something that looked like a ball of white mush on top of some green mush and an English muffin. Yuta’s dish seemed to have three whole unpeeled carrots in it. Was this what brunch was? Ten was eating something that had just been described on the menu as “breakfast soup”! Lucas was beyond freaked out! Not to mention that Yuta was still acting super weird and trying to spoon-feed some of his brunch to Sicheng, who wasn’t very into it! Maybe this was all just an elaborate prank that Ten had cooked up as part of some sexy game? If that was the case, maybe he’d cooked up this monkey bread, too, and it was so yummy that Lucas made a mental note to ask him for the recipe so he could pass it on to his mom.

While Lucas was scarfing down the monkey bread, Ten and Yuta and Sicheng had resumed their conversation, but now they were talking about how much they all hated Elon Musk. Lucas thought maybe that was the guy who made Teslas, and couldn’t really figure out why they all hated him. Yuta said something about how he was… covered in… grime? Maybe? Kind of mean to hate someone just for being a little dirty, but it was none of Lucas’s business. 

Ten nudged his mimosa towards Lucas again and Lucas decided to give it a shot. Not a literal shot, since he’d learned the hard way that you can’t really do shots of champagne (he’d sneezed for thirty minutes), but just a taste. He took a sip, swished it around in his mouth, then swallowed. “Hmm,” he said. “Overrated.”

“Hater,” Ten scolded. 

“What else did you expect from a straight man?” Yuta said dryly, once again sounding totally like himself, and although that was kind of mean, Lucas honestly felt better that there was at least _something_ familiar going on. 

He handed the mimosa back to Ten, watching as Ten spun it around so he’d be taking a sip from the spot where the glass already had a lip gloss stain on the rim. Cooties! “I don’t know,” Ten said coyly. “He’s full of surprises.”

“Yeah, like, did you know I’m double-jointed?” Lucas said, setting down his fork so he could demonstrate. Ten reached over to pick up Lucas’s fork and push it back into his hand to keep him from demonstrating. Lucas pouted.

“Wait, actually,” Ten said, even more coy than before, and if he got any more coy he’d be bright orange and swimming in a pond outside a Benihana like a koi fish, “Yuta, I’m going to the bathroom, come with me.”

“Ooh, okay,” Yuta said, smiling just as deviously back at Ten. They both folded up their napkins and set them on the table and got up, giggling. Then Yuta turned to Sicheng, gently resting his hand on his shoulder and rubbing at it for a moment. “I’ll be back soon, will you miss me?”

“Mhm,” Sicheng said, and Yuta gazed so adoringly at him that even Lucas got shy! Sheesh!

“Behave,” was all Ten said to Lucas on his way out, and then he and Yuta linked arms and headed off to the bathroom, continuing to giggle. 

Now, this Lucas did understand, since girls did it sometimes, too. They weren’t going to the bathroom just to go, they were going to go gossip. Which was valid, but now Lucas was just sitting awkwardly across from Sicheng, who was just continuing to mostly silently munch his brunch mush. 

“So, uh,” Lucas said, on the brink of death from all this silence (it’s a commonly-known fact that if Lucas had to stay quiet for more than fifteen seconds while awake, he died instantly). “How long have you and Yuta been together?”

“A little more than a year,” Sicheng said. “Ten introduced us, actually.”

Oh, shit? Then that meant Sicheng must have known Ten pretty well. Lucas, fidgeting, scooted his chair closer to the table. “Can I— can I ask you something about Ten?”

“I can’t guarantee I’ll know the answer, but sure,” Sicheng said, raising his eyebrows.

Lucas could tell he was freaking Sicheng out a little, but now he had an actual opportunity to unlock forbidden Ten lore, and no way was he backing down. “Uh, so— Ten is really sneaky and never tells me anything about himself,” he explained. “And he’s really cool but also super weird? Like, he has all these random jobs and I don’t know what they are, and he Ubers everywhere? What’s his deal? Like, what’s up? Is he, y’know… in witness protection? What did he see? Was it… aliens?”

“Oh,” Sicheng said. He stopped looking like an alarmed mystery animal and started looking like an amused mystery animal. “I guess he wouldn’t tell you right off the bat, yeah.”

“Tell me what? Did I guess right?!” Lucas said, scared for Ten’s life but also super excited because that was fucking savage! 

“No, he’s not in witness protection,” Sicheng said, taking a sip of his coffee. He talked pretty slow, but this was really a lot, and Lucas was getting suspicious that he was just dragging this out because he thought it was funny. Lucas fidgeted impatiently, and Sicheng set his mug down. “He’s just really rich. His family is, like, loaded.”

Lucas blinked once, then twice, then three whole times. “Uh… and?”

“And he’s kind of embarrassed about it,” Sicheng shrugged. “That’s why he’s never had a long-term job or anything, he doesn’t need one. Trust fund life.”

“Holy shit,” Lucas said. That honestly explained a lot, but also now he had so many more questions??? Like, did that mean the earring Lucas had sucked on this morning was a real diamond??? Wow!!! He knew it had tasted different than a regular rhinestone!!! “That’s why he’s so weird! I get it now! I guess his clothes are all really nice.”

“I know, right? You can tell him I told you, but he probably won’t give you any more information,” Sicheng said. 

Lucas hummed, trying to think of more things that made sense now that he knew Ten was rich. But he didn’t want to be rude and just interrogate Sicheng, who had already given him valuable information, so he very reluctantly offered, “Do you want some of this?”

Sicheng eyed the monkey bread. “Sure,” he said and reached across to pinch off a piece with his fork. He ate it, then nodded. “It’s good.”

Great conversation. Lucas fidgeted again. Now that the exchange was over, the interrogation could continue. “Uh… Did Ten and Yuta ever date?”

“You know you can ask Ten all this stuff yourself, right?” Sicheng pointed out. 

“I tried and he laughed at me!” Lucas said mournfully. “It’s okay if you don’t wanna tell me.”

“They never dated,” Sicheng said, glancing over Lucas’s shoulder to see if the terrible twos were coming back. “But there was… an incident.”

“An incident?” Lucas repeated, confused.

Sicheng nodded. “When they were freshmen. I think it involved a tarot reading, but Yuta told me about it a very long time ago and I don’t remember.”

“Taro?” Lucas said. Like the boba flavor, or? Ugh, he’d just have to ask Ten about it later. He could tell he was running out of time to ask Sicheng questions, so he rushed to get out a couple more: “Why is Ten’s Facebook so blank?”

“Is it? Probably because he doesn’t want to show off his expensive lifestyle,” Sicheng shrugged. “I’m not on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s watching you, you know.”

“Wh— sure,” Lucas said, scrunching up his nose. “Um, last question maybe, why does Ten bite me so much?”

Sicheng looked like he was trying really hard not to bust out laughing. “I can’t help you with that one, man, sorry.”

“Oh,” Lucas said, disappointed. “I thought maybe it was a gay thing. Does Y—” Never mind! NEVER MIND! That was a question he didn’t want the answer to! 

“No, he doesn’t,” Sicheng said, and Lucas, face burning, nodded and started shredding the last of his monkey bread into segments again so he wouldn’t have to look at him or think about anything at all. He thought maybe Sicheng was laughing now, but he wasn’t about to look up to check.

He didn’t have to survive through much more silence, though, because then Ten and Yuta came back, and Ten gently ruffled his hand through the hair on the back of Lucas’s head, then tweaked his ear. “What’d we miss?” he said, smiling at Sicheng as Lucas, horribly tickled, almost inhaled some monkey bread and had to have a sip of ice water to wash it down properly.

“Not much,” Sicheng said. “What have you been _doing_ to him? Why doesn’t he know anything about you?” Ugh, joining the club of talking about Lucas in the third person, but whatev.

“Because I think it’s funny,” Ten shrugged, laying his small cute hand on Lucas’s thigh again. 

“Well, it’s not,” Sicheng said, eyebrows raised, but he sounded like he was also smiling. “You should tell him stuff.”

“I don’t really mind,” Lucas said, no longer choking on monkey bread. Then he made the mistake of looking up from his plate at Sicheng, then immediately finally realized what animal he looked like, and he was so excited to have figured it out that he just blurted, “Fennec fox!!!!”

Sicheng paused, his forkful of brunch mush halfway to his mouth. “Excuse me?”

“Are you feeling okay?” Ten said, amused, and patted Lucas’s thigh lightly. “Lay off the sugar, babe.”

“He looks kinda like a— sorry,” Lucas mumbled, going bright red yet again. He put his free hand under the table on Ten’s forearm and squeezed to ask him for some fucking help here, and Ten smiled at him, that cute fangy smile from yesterday, which did make Lucas feel better.

“You _do_ look like a fennec fox,” Yuta, across the table, cooed, scooting his chair until his shoulder knocked against Sicheng’s and he could wriggle against his side. Christ, not this shit again. 

Meanwhile, Ten had stolen a bite of monkey bread. “Ooh, this is yummy,” he said. “Want some of my breakfast soup?”

“No thanks,” Lucas said, looking with fear at the breakfast soup. Ten’s hand was still on Lucas’s leg, and that was continuing to make Lucas feel better — as well as low levels of turned on, but he was used to that by now and the napkin was still on his lap, so everything was chill — so he felt brave enough to try and grab this bull by the horns (by bull he meant Yuta and Sicheng, and by horns he meant brunch, he wasn’t planning on literally grabbing anyone here except Ten) and turn all this around in his favor. He took a sip of his ice water. “Soooo, any of y’all ever watch Planet Earth?”

“The nature documentary series?” Yuta said, his eyebrows going up into his purple hair. 

“Yeah,” Lucas said, tapping his fork on the table just for something to do. “Yeah, so, there was an episode about fennec foxes— well, the episode was about a lot of things— anyway, their ears are so big because they live in the Sahara, and they help them regulate their body temperature. Actually, even with the ears, they’re the smallest species of fox.”

Ten was looking at Lucas very strangely. “What’s the biggest species of fox, then?”

“Um… the red fox, I think,” Lucas said. He showed the approximate size of both foxes with his hands, but his measurements were pretty inconsistent. Nobody seemed to be really paying attention, though, so he gave up and kept eating his monkey bread.

“Are red pandas foxes?” Yuta said, also looking very weirdly at Lucas. Then again, his face was naturally just kinda weird, and Lucas suspected that maybe he was a mind-reader, so he thought extra hard about foxes to answer his question.

“Nope. They’re… pandas. Kinda. And raccoons are raccoons. Raccoon _dogs_ are foxes, though,” Lucas said and took another bite. 

“Why do you know so much about foxes?” Ten asked, his voice now as strange as his facial expression. Tender, maybe? Now Lucas wanted chicken tenders. Maybe he and Ten could go to Burger King after this. Fingers crossed, because this monkey bread was yummy but definitely not enough food for a growing boy such as Lucas.

“I had mono for, like, two months in high school, and my mom had a boxset of Planet Earth and we didn’t have cable, so I had nothing else to do at home,” Lucas explained with a shrug. “I know a fuckton about tree frogs, too. Like, there’s one kind of tree frog where the dad raises the eggs. Like seahorses!”

“Are you a bio major?” Sicheng asked, completing the trio of weird looks Lucas was getting. They didn’t seem negative?? Just… surprised?? Lucas couldn’t figure out what, exactly, the facial expression was, and it was kind of freaky.

“Nah, undecided for now,” he said. “I don’t think I’d wanna do bio, though, I was really bad at dissecting stuff in high school. It’s probably even worse in college, right?”

“Oh my God,” Ten said, and Lucas looked over at him and saw that he was starting to go pink. Not really in a blushing way — Lucas was literally pleased as punch that he could tell when Ten was blushing!! — but just generally pink. Lucas raised his eyebrows at him to ask what was up, and Ten just shook his head a little, taking a sip of his mimosa.

“Next you’ll say you read National Geographic,” Yuta said, sounding not quite Sicheng-related sappy but also not quite mean, either.

“Hell yeah, Nat Geo fucks,” Lucas said. “The kids magazine was good shit, too, although I always liked Ranger Rick more when I was little because the activities were funner.”

Ten drained the rest of his mimosa and didn’t even cough. Wow, he truly had a throat of steel. Lucas knew that first-hand, but, like. Wow. “I know you hate wearing khaki, but you’d look hot in a little safari outfit like Steve Irwin,” he said for some reason.

“The Crocodile Hunter himself? I went as him for Halloween last year,” Lucas said. 

“Wait, so did I,” Sicheng said, looking startled by the realization. “Yuta was the crocodile.”

“Oh God,” Lucas said.

“Well, _I_ came as Tinkerbell. Technically I decided I was called Tinkerbeau, but the costume was the same,” Ten said, flagging down a waiter to get a refill of his mimosa.

“He flew into the house on a really elaborate wire system,” Yuta told Lucas, who was shook at being talked to directly once again but not as worried about it anymore. 

“Anything for a good party,” Ten shrugged while Lucas looked at him with shocked impressedness. The most _he’d_ ever done for a party was really badly fuck up making Jello shots, which he hadn’t even known was possible, but apparently you’re not supposed to _heat_ the Jello, you’re supposed to _cool_ it, which… maybe made sense. 

Then Lucas actually realized what Ten had said about his Halloween costume and his chair wobbled dangerously as he jolted in turned-on horror. “Tinkerbell?” he said, voice squeaky. “Uh, do you have pictures?”

“ _Shhh_ ,” Ten said, laughing, then turned his head to give Lucas a warm, syrupy look. “I do. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”

Now Lucas was the one who felt syrupy, and not even in a pancakey way. Ugh, go figure that Ten would be into Lucas dressed as Steve Irwin. “Deal,” he nodded, cheeks red, and adjusted the napkin in his lap. Ten smiled sneakily at him, then offered him his mimosa. Lucas shook his head, still hung up on the whole Ten-in-a-teeny-tiny-sparkly-outfit thing. His legs! The low-cut top! Oof!

“You know, I told you back then that Twinkerbell would have been a better joke, and I still stand by that,” Yuta said.

Lucas had been about to take the final bite of his monkey bread, but the piece tumbled to the plate as he honked out a laugh. It was his worst laugh, the one that sounded like a bike horn, and he covered his mouth with his hand immediately but the damage was done: Yuta was back to looking at him like he was watching a turtle trying to flip itself back over but doing nothing to help. “Sorry,” Lucas said weakly. “That was just— yeah, you’re right.”

“Hey,” Ten said, offended. “You’re supposed to agree with _me_.”

“Sorry!!!!” Lucas said again, but Yuta was starting to look like a smug grape instead of an angry grape, and he didn’t really know why but he thought that might have been a good thing? 

“I’m always right, he gets it,” Yuta said, and Ten scowled at Lucas.

“Traitor,” he said. “After all I’ve done for you?”

“Your joke was good, too!” Lucas rushed to say. “And I bet you looked great!”

“I did, obviously,” Ten sniffed, and although he was being all prissy like the fancy cat from Aristocats, he still leaned against Lucas. 

Lucas grinned nervously. Ten seemed miffed but not mad, and Yuta wasn’t acting crazy cutesy anymore but was still being nice, and Sicheng was pretty cool, too. And Lucas hadn’t even spilled anything on himself yet! Of course as soon as he had that thought, a passing waiter caught Lucas off-guard and he moved quickly to pull his legs back out of the walking path, jostling himself and nearly pouring half his root beer float down his front. The only thing that stopped him was knowing that this was Ten’s jacket, and he fumbled around with the glass for a while before managing to set it down on the table where it stayed, wobbling.

“Fast reflexes,” Sicheng commented, and Lucas’s ears went pink. 

Ten’s friends had seemed very silly-mean at first, but now Lucas could see that they were just as nice as Ten, just in different ways. Like, it had been surprising that Yuta hadn’t liked Lucas at first (since Lucas already knew that gay guys tended to like him! He wasn’t even being arrogant, it just happened a lot!!), but now maybe he’d been won over, and Sicheng had answered Lucas’s questions really patiently and he was really normal and chill, too, plus he’d laughed at one or two of Lucas’s jokes. So now Lucas looked cool in front of Ten’s friends, and Ten’s friends were nice! It was a win-win situation!

At that exact second, Yuta started, “Winwin—”

“Aah?!” Lucas said, really freaked out by Yuta reading his mind. Mind-reading powers confirmed! Lucas was gonna have to be really careful with his thoughts now, but he was pretty sure Yuta wouldn’t want to poke around in his head anyways. Better safe than sorry, though. 

Yuta looked at Lucas with enough power to wither a plant. Lucas shrank back, trying not to hide too obviously behind Ten, who was now playing 2048 on his phone and not paying attention. “As I was saying,” Yuta continued, “Winwin, lemme pay for brunch, pleeeease?”

“Who’s Winwin,” Lucas whispered into Ten’s ear, since now they were so close together.

“Sicheng,” Ten whispered back, scooting just a little closer. “It’s been his nickname since forever. Kinda like you with Xuxi.”

“Aw, snap, I forgot you knew about that,” Lucas mumbled. 

Ten bit his lip, smiling, and nudged Lucas’s shoulder with his own bony one to make him look down at Ten’s phone. Lucas looked, and watched as Ten pulled up his messages and scrolled through to show him that he was actually in Ten’s phone as Xuxi (and the eggplant emoji. Classy as always). 

“First I had it as triple-x Xxxuxi, but it looked dumb,” Ten explained. “Before that, I had you in as Yukhei for about a week, and it was also just Lucas for a while, I kept switching around. What am I in your phone as, hmm?”

Jesus. Ten was the only person in the whole entire world, all 7 and a half billion people, count ‘em, who could make asking what his contact name was sound as sexy and sultry as asking to suck Lucas’s dick. “Just Ten,” Lucas said. 

“No emojis?”

Lucas shook his head. “You can pick some if you want,” he offered, getting his phone out. He had a text from his mom, which FaceID revealed as _How is it going??? :))))._ Lucas blushed and swiped it away, then opened his conversation with Ten instead so Ten could change his contact. 

They had the exact same phone, and yet for some reason, Lucas’s iPhone X looked way bigger in Ten’s hands than Ten’s had. Lucas draped his arm over the back of Ten’s chair so he could see better and watched Ten scroll through all the various emoji options before finally settling on the little pixie-fairy one, adding the pink and green bonbon next to it, and then finishing with one of the purple astrology ones, Lucas had no idea which one it was, at the end. 

“There,” Ten said, handing his phone back to him. “Don’t change them. Okay?”

“I wasn’t gonna,” Lucas pouted, one-thumbedly texting Mom back _it s fine ate some bread_ under the table. 

Ten was still smiling. “Tell Vivian I say hi!”

Great, of course Ten could read minds, too. Lucas had known that for a while, but seeing it at the same time as Yuta’s identical skills was freaky. Was the incident Sicheng had mentioned not any kind of weird hookup but actually a seminar on mind-reading? “Kay,” he said and added _ten says hi!_ above the table this time.

Yuta and Sicheng were definitely not paying attention, anyway, still tenderly bickering over who would pay for brunch. Gawd, seeing Yuta like this was so uncomfortable, and Lucas barely knew him. His face just didn’t seem like it should move in all those ways! Every time he made kissy lips at Sicheng, a part of Lucas’s soul died! But thankfully, the torture didn’t last long, because they just decided to go halfsies. Which had seemed like the obvious solution all along, but whatever.

Lucas turned to Ten — he didn’t have to turn very far, since he’d kept his arm on the back of Ten’s chair, the perfect comfy compromise to his previous scrunched-up problem — to ask about how they were splitting the bill, but before he could even open his mouth all the way (well, not all the way, that would have been pretty weird to do at brunch, Lucas could open his mouth _really_ wide) to ask, Ten said, “I got it.”

“Oh,” Lucas said, blinking. “Are you sure? You literally don’t have to. I got paid Friday, I’m living large. Do you even _know_ how many McDonald’s apple pies I can afford now? Because I sure don’t! The possibilities are infinite!”

“Do you have an off switch?” Ten huffed, but he was smiling anyway, leaning into Lucas again and whisking his wallet seemingly out of nowhere. “Yeah, I got it. I still owe you one from way back when, remember?”

Literally what was Ten talking about. Sure, now that Lucas knew Ten was a trust fund kid he wasn’t about to fight too hard against getting a free meal, but what? “Uh, totally,” he said, hoping he was convincing enough that Ten wouldn’t call his bluff.

Ten rolled his eyes. “Remember?” he insisted. “You covered my shift for me when I had a date. And I said I’d owe you.”

“Uhhhhhhhhh,” Lucas said. Then he kind of did remember; Ten had been wearing makeup and he’d given Lucas a boner, as usual. Jeez, that had been forever ago. “I guess…? You worked anyway, though, right? So why do you still owe me?”

“Just cuz,” Ten shrugged. “I hoped you’d use it for some freaky sexual favor, but if wishes were fishes I’d have a whole aquarium. Excuse me, _garçon?_ ” He flagged down a waiter. 

Fish? French words? Lucas was totally lost, but he’d understood the sexual favor part and pouted, regretting all his choices. Maybe that offer was still on the table. He’d figure something out. 

After the waiter had come to collect Ten, Yuta, and Sicheng’s credit cards (and Lucas just sat there feeling like a princess), Ten and Yuta made significant eye contact, then had a very intense whispered conversation over the table, complete with really dramatic facial expressions. Lucas couldn’t understand a single word, and by the looks of it, neither could Sicheng, who just smiled in a weird dad-like way at Lucas when they accidentally held eye contact too long, which kept happening. Lucas, getting a Kun vibe, tried his best to smile back. 

Honestly, Sicheng was really cool. Lucas had totally aced this whole meeting-the-friends thing. He wondered what would happen if Ten ever met _his_ friends; it would probably result in at least one building burning down, depending on which friends it was. But none of them lived nearby enough to hang out over the summer, and although that had been kinda sad at first, now it was clearly for the best, since it meant Ten wouldn’t have to sit through Lucas’s usual activities with his friend group, like really hype drinking games to go with the first 3 seasons of _The Office_ and midnight basketball and watching vape trick tutorials on YouTube, then trying to recreate them and ending up with at least one person having a really bad asthma attack. Now that Lucas thought about it, his friends were kind of dorky, not aloof and cool like Ten’s friends, but he liked them that way, since Lucas was kinda dorky, too.

The hissy conversation ended — they both sounded like snakes by the end of it, it was pretty funny — and Yuta leaned back. “Well!” he said, taking Sicheng’s hand and squeezing it. “We’re going to head out!”

“We are?” Sicheng said, blinking over to him. 

“Yep! Remember, lovebug, we have plans,” Yuta said and stared very intensely right into Sicheng’s eyes. To be fair, he seemed to always stare very intensely right into Sicheng’s eyes, but this was even more intense than usual. 

“…Right,” Sicheng said slowly after a second. “Plans.”

“So when we get our cards back, we’re gonna go,” Yuta nodded. “Because we have places to be, things to do. You know how it is!”

“Saaaad,” Ten sighed, crossing his legs at the ankles and leaning back against Lucas. “I thought we’d at least have time for one more mimosa.”

“Oh? We might have time for one more mimosa, actually,” Yuta said, raising his eyebrows, but then there was another under-table thump and he scowled at Ten. “Or not. Bitch.”

“Your plans are very important,” Ten said innocently. 

Lucas didn’t really understand why Ten was banishing Yuta and Sicheng, but he was going with the flow anyways. “It was great to meet you,” he told Sicheng. “Uh, thanks for…”

“Don’t mention it,” Sicheng said and glanced briefly at Ten. “Ten, please for the love of GOD don’t steal all his clothes.”

“Too late,” Ten said, midway through signing the receipt the waiter had just brought back with his full name, which was too long for the signature line. He had to circle it around the underside, then went back to dot all the i’s with hearts. 

Sicheng shrugged. “I tried,” he said. “See you around, Lucas, take care of yourself.”

Nah, he was way less dad-like than Kun. More like… a chill uncle? Lucas’s uncles were all very un-chill, but if he’d had a chill one, Sicheng could have been it. “I’ll try!” he said. “You, too!”

Sicheng smiled at him, then very gently put his hand on Yuta’s shoulder. “Well, since our plans are so important, let’s go.”

“We’re still on for Wednesday, right? My pores are dying,” Yuta said, gathering up his and Sicheng’s cards and putting them back in his wallet. 

“Duh,” Ten said. “I bought a whole tub of snail serum, I’m ready to go.”

“Ooh la la,” Yuta said and stood up, catching Sicheng’s hand in his own again. Then he looked over at Lucas, seemingly struggling with himself for a second before smiling. “Maybe you are kinda cute.”

“Told you so,” Ten said while Lucas spluttered, blushing very hard.

“Whatever, don’t let it get to his head,” Yuta said. “Laters!”

He and Sicheng peaced out, and Lucas looked down at Ten, not blushing as hard anymore but definitely still a little flustered. “Why’d you make them leave?”

“Oh no, you could tell that’s what I was doing? We talked about it beforehand,” Ten said with a small shrug. “The plan was that they’d leave by 1 just in case they were freaking you out. I know they can be a lot, so.”

“It’s fine, they were great!” Lucas assured him, although holy shit, that was so nice of everyone involved. He was surprised Yuta had agreed to that in the first place, even before Lucas had won him over, but wow. “And they weren’t freaking me out, though? They could have hung out more, it’s okay!”

“I know, but I wanted you all to myself,” Ten said. “We can hang out with them again some other time, if you want. But you have all of today off, right?”

Suddenly Lucas remembered Ten saying this morning that they had the whole day to fool around after brunch, and he was way less hung up on Yuta and Sicheng leaving. “Yeah,” he said. “What about it?”

Ten looked up at him through his eyelashes, then very obviously looked down at Lucas’s mouth. They really were sitting super close together now, and Lucas suavely slipped his arm down from the back of Ten’s chair to curl around his shoulders instead. “I think we had some unfinished business,” Ten said. 

“Like ghosts,” Lucas agreed.

“You know what, sure,” Ten said. “Did you like them? Really?”

“Ehhh,” Lucas said, knowing damn well this was a trick question. “Yuta still kind of scares me, TBH, but they’re cool. Way cooler than my friends.”

“Even your cute bi friend?” Ten said, all of a sudden the poutiest boy in the world, and Lucas got whiplash from what a quick turnaround that had been. He hadn’t even said Jaemin was cute! He didn’t even _know_ if Jaemin was cute!

“Um…” Another trick question. “Not as cool as you?”

Ten hooted in gay, flattered shock. “You’re never getting laid ever again,” he told Lucas, his cheeks blush-pink and his whole face flustered, then whirled out of his chair. Lucas, laughing, got up, too, and kept laughing about it quietly to himself all the way back to Ten’s place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HRHF THANK U SO MUCH FOR READING!!!!!! for the first time ever, ill be posting a second “chapter” to this one (it’s not a direct continuation, just a bonus scene that i really wanted to write but couldnt make long enough to go on its own) so if you wanna see that, subscribe to this one, and i’ll post it this saturday, feb. 2!!!
> 
> other than that, please subscribe to the series (linked below) if u want more, i’ll be back with cdf6 sooooon and that one? lemme just say yall have been asking about it for a WHILE and now its FINALLY GONNA HAPPEN. hehe.
> 
> useful links: my [twitter](https://twitter.com/paratazxis), my [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/paratazxis), the [cdf playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/chicagotaz/playlist/05QwZESjjnt04Myb40lWxB?si=ERxrC7nlTGuvcGoLr2sniA) (i take requests)!! and do pls leave me a comment if u liked this or just lmk ur thoughts :’’)) i love talking about cdf!!! so come chat!! 
> 
> thank you so much for reading, im always so surprised and pleased and happy about the response these get, i love all of u thank u so much :’’’))) ill be back soon!!! until then.... stan wayv


	2. the Markening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Then the redhead turned to me and said, get over here, and what was I gonna do, say no?” Lucas continued. They were currently going past Lululemon, and out of sheer respect for women, he lowered his voice. “So I got over there.”
> 
> “And you made out with both of them?” Mark said, shook. “At the same time? Then what happened?”
> 
> “Then…” Lucas looked off into the distance, reminiscing, and suddenly saw a _very_ familiar twinky figure emerging from Sephora. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hewwo squad welcome to part 2 of cdf5!!!! this is a scene i've had planned since my pal ellie and i first came up with the concept of cdf and i've wanted to write it forever but it was too short to stand on its own and too random to go w anything else, so here it is!!! hope u enjoy >:}

As it so happened, when Lucas had been thinking about how he didn’t have any hometown friends, he’d forgotten about someone, but thankfully he’d remembered with plenty of time for them to go loiter at the local mall and catch up before the school year started again.

“—and that’s why I have a lifetime ban from that Whole Foods!” Lucas finished. “Pretty fucked up that they have that policy, right? Like, how was I supposed to know iguanas weren’t allowed in there? It wasn’t my fault.”

“That’s crazy,” Mark said. 

Lucas nodded, hooking his thumbs in his belt loops and scuffing his shoes along the mall floor as they walked along. “So… where do _you_ grocery shop these days?”

“Usually Target,” Mark shrugged, and Lucas lit up.

“No way! I work there!” But he didn’t know what else to say about it, since nothing too iguana-at-Whole-Foods-crazy had happened recently. Somehow, when they’d been in high school, they’d had things to talk about or they’d been playing video games (a solid rotation of CoD, Spyro, and Minecraft) at Mark’s house (if they were at Lucas’s place, Mom would only let them play Uno, sadly, and it was no fun with two players) and hadn’t needed to talk, but now this was just a little awkward. 

“For real? Cool,” Mark said. “Yeah, Target’s great.”

“Totally!” Lucas agreed. And didn’t know where to go from that point. But the great thing about hanging out at the mall was there was always stuff to do even if you didn’t know what to say, so he started steering them in the direction of the Lego store.

“How’d you start working there?” Mark asked.

“Oh, it’s kind of a funny story,” Lucas said, perking up again at the chance to get things flowing. He’d been worried when the iguana story hadn’t worked, but this was promising. And he had missed Mark, honestly, and it was great to know he was as short and easily entertained as ever! “I was working at this fancy French restaurant, but then I got fired for being a bad waiter, I couldn’t pronounce any of the menu items right. Like, how do you think… this is pronounced?” He got out his phone and quickly typed out _boeuf bourguignon,_ which took a few tries to spell right, but AutoCorrect had his back. Thanks, Steve Jobs! RIP!

Mark was already starting to crack up a little, leaning in to see Lucas’s phone. “Um… boof berg… I don’t know, how do you say it?”

“I still have no idea!” Lucas confessed, also starting to laugh. “I always said it as beef borg onion. Pretty sure that’s wrong, but I guess I’ll never know!”

“Beef borg onion,” Mark repeated, laughing and shaking his head. 

Lucas grinned gleefully. “Yeah, so, they fired me, and then I applied to Target like the next day and the manager called me at like 8 the next morning and it woke me up and I thought I was getting killed, so I said ‘help’ instead of ‘hello’ when I answered the phone? But then he told me to come in and do an in-person interview later, and I did, and he said he’d hire me to work inventory, since I guess I seemed like I was desperate enough to take any job. And now I work there!”

“Is that the whole story?” Mark said, still laughing.

“Yeah,” Lucas said with a pleased shrug, grinning even wider, then got distracted when they walked past Auntie Anne’s. “Oh _shit_ , do you want a pretzel?”

“ _Heck_ yeah, dude,” Mark said. And so they went and got pretzels.

A few minutes later, ballin’ with pretzels and frozen lemonade, they were back to being the kings of the mall, just like in their high school glory days. “How’s college going?” Lucas asked around a mouthful of pretzel.

“Huh?” Mark said, his mouth also full.

Lucas held up a pretzel-greasy hand to let Mark know he was chewing and would try again in a second. He chewed, then swallowed, then said, “How’s college?”

“It’s good,” Mark nodded. “I declared as an econ major at the end of the year, so yeah.”

“Shit, that’s serious business,” Lucas said, impressed, then took a big suck of his frozen lemonade. 

“Watch out!” Mark said, but it was too late, Lucas’s brain was fully freezing. 

“Ow,” Lucas said miserably. 

“I gotchu, bro,” Mark said, just as miserably, and sucked really hard on his frozen lemonade straw so they’d both be suffering.

“Noooooo,” Lucas said, but wow, what a heroic sacrifice. Now they were both just standing there with their faces scrunched up while they waited for the brain freeze to pass. Hashtag besties! It was like they’d never been apart at all! Maybe that My Little Pony show was onto something — friendship really was magic.

Once the brain freeze had faded, they resumed walking and talking. “So yeah, econ major, maybe gonna go to business school after college,” Mark nodded. “How bout you?”

“Undecided,” Lucas said, which sounded lamer and lamer every time he said it. He really needed to pick a major. Maybe Mom would have some tips? Somehow he’d managed not to ask her about picking one, and she hadn’t asked first, either. She’d probably know what Lucas wanted to study, though. “But I started playing baseball again, I forget if I told you already.”

“Nah, you didn’t, but that’s great!” Mark said. “I still haven’t played since Little League. Good for you, man, keeping active.”

Speaking of keeping active. Lucas munched on his pretzel again, then glanced over to Mark. “So… are you still doing that no sex until marriage thing?”

Mark went a little red and frowned, fidgeting with his pretzel wrapper. “Um, no, not anymore.”

“He- _heyyyy_ , my man,” Lucas said, clapping a huge hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Grats. Who was the lucky lady?”

“We broke up,” Mark said sourly and Lucas yikes’d, removing his hand from Mark’s shoulder and taking another bite of his pretzel instead. 

But still, no wonder he seemed kinda different! The last time Lucas had seen Mark, he’d been a total virgin, and now he wasn’t anymore! Maybe now he’d let Lucas talk about his sex life for once, which he’d never been okay with back in high school because it was “immoral.” Lucas finished off his frozen lemonade and pretzel, flung the wrappers and cup into a nearby trashcan, and dusted his hands off, starting to grin slyly. “Well, since you’re a man of the world now, wanna hear about this Swedish exchange student I hooked up with?”

Mark’s eyes widened. “Um, okay,” he said hesitantly, and Lucas triumphantly slung an arm around Mark’s shoulders.

“Strap in, it’s a wild ride. So here I am at this orientation week party, and I see this chick rocking _full_ lederhosen—”

Lucas launched into the story, which was extensive and complicated and ended with Lucas getting head in a SmartCar (honestly, fitting in the car had been more of an adventure than the BJ itself, but whatev). What a great night! One of the details about it, something about the shirt Astrid had been wearing but then had stopped wearing pretty soon, reminded him of a _different_ incident: baby’s first frat party, where he’d seen two girls make out on a table, so he told Mark all about that too, in really detailed detail.

“Then the redhead turned to me and said, get over here, and what was I gonna do, say no?” Lucas continued. They were currently going past Lululemon, and out of sheer respect for women, he lowered his voice. “So I got over there.”

“And you made out with both of them?” Mark said, shook. “At the same time?”

“Not at the exact same time, my mouth’s big but it’s not _that_ big, but yeah,” Lucas said proudly. “Sorry, is this TMI? I don’t wanna make you uncomfortable, man.”

“No, it’s fine, that’s crazy,” Mark said, sounding a little jealous. “Then what happened?”

“Then…” Lucas looked off into the distance, reminiscing, and suddenly saw a _very_ familiar twinky figure emerging from Sephora. “Ten?!”

Ten spun around very slowly on one foot and looked over the top of his comically huge black sunglasses at Lucas and Mark. “Oh, my God, hi, I thought I heard your voice,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Hi!” Lucas said, beaming, and bounced on over to him.

Ten looked _so_ good as fucking usual. It was ridonculous. Along with the sunglasses, he was wearing a sleeveless black crop top that ended just below his belly button and was just a little see-through. Like, why even wear a shirt at that point? He was also holding a bottle of light green juice and a big bag from Neiman Marcus. “Shh, I’m really hungover,” Ten said, which explained the sunglasses, and tilted his head up to see Lucas when he’d gotten all the way over to him.

Lucas leaned down to give him a lil kiss on his cute mouth since Ten had upturned his face like that, and he was so hype to see Ten out in the wild that he couldn’t stop smiling. “Oh, that tastes good, what is that?” he said, and Ten offered him the bottle, also smiling to himself.

“Pineapple-green apple-mint,” he said. His voice sounded all raspy like he was sleepy; not as much, but it was still sexy, and Lucas’s hands were itching to grope the half-inch of skin under his shirt but over the waistband of his weird angular sweatpants, but they were super in public, so he held back. “Who’s your little friend?”

Oh, shit, Lucas had forgotten about Mark! “That’s Mark!” he said, taking the juice and unscrewing the cap. “We went to high school together! And we both did Little League! And Boy Scouts!”

“How wholesome,” Ten said, looking around Lucas to smile lightly at Mark. “Just hanging out? Surely you’re not shopping, two strapping young lads like you.”

Okay, ignoring Ten calling him and Mark ‘strapping young lads,’ Lucas knew this one! He and his mom had watched _Airplane_ about five times last summer! “We’re just hanging out, and don’t call me Shirley,” he said, bursting with pride, and took a sip of Ten’s juice. It was really yummy, and he took another gulp before handing it back. 

“You’re so corny,” Ten sighed, accepting the bottle of juice and taking a small sip as well. “Well, I _was_ shopping, but I have work later, so I was about to head home and sleep this off while I still can.”

“Okey-doke,” Lucas said. “Did you Uber here, do you need help carrying your bags out?”

“I’m hungover, not _dying,_ I can carry them myself,” Ten said, rolling his eyes. “They’re not that heavy. I just got a new silk robe and some other stuff, I forgot already, ugh. I’ll show you later, okay?”

Lucas knew what that meant, and he grinned again, running a hand back through his hair to push it out of his eyes. Over the course of the summer so far, it had gotten really long, he’d probably need a trim when he got back to campus. “Yeah, just lemme know.”

Ten hummed to say yes and looked around him to Mark again. “Was he a good Boy Scout?”

“Oh man,” Mark said. Lucas glanced over his shoulder to check if he was still even there, and saw that Mark was fully deer in the headlights’d looking at Ten. Yeah, Lucas could relate. The shirt was a _lot_. “Was Luke a good Boy Scout… Uh, I think so? We got all the same merit badges and stuff.”

Noooooo, nooooooooooooo, cringe cringe cringe. Fuck. Lucas hoped desperately that Ten hadn’t heard, but Ten was starting to smile his most evil smile and take his sunglasses off, so obviously he had. “How interesting,” he purred, hooking his sunglasses in the collar of his shirt. “Is that true, _Luke?_ What merit badges did you get? Luke?”

“I don’t remember,” Lucas said, tragically resigning himself to being called Luke for the rest of his miserable life. “I’ll ask my mom, she has pictures from all the ceremonies. Weren’t you leaving?”

Ten giggled up at him, his eyes sparkling. “I sure was, Luke.”

Lucas groaned, covering his face with his hand for a second and wishing he and Mark would both drop dead. “For the record, he’s the _only_ person who ever called me that,” he mumbled, quietly enough that Mark hopefully wouldn’t hear, and Ten just laughed.

“Not anymore,” he sing-songed, still smiling. “Okay, okay, I’ll get out of your hair. Have fun. And call me later.”

Lucas nodded and Ten tilted his head up again, more purposefully this time, and even though Lucas was grumpy about this whole Luke thing, he leaned in to kiss him bye. Ten pushed up on his toes and returned the kiss sweetly — way too sweetly for a man who’d just been smiling like Cruella de Vil and mocking Lucas with an old middle school nickname — then sighed very quietly and dropped back down. Lucas licked his own lower lip, tasting Ten’s juice (haha, maybe later, depending on when Ten was free), and smiled dopily at him, not grumpy anymore. “Bye.”

Ten fluttered his fingers at him in a little wave, then turned and sashayed away, putting his sunglasses back on as he went. 

Lucas watched his hips and ass, duh, then made a contented noise and turned back to Mark. “Damn, that juice was good, I wonder where he got it.” Was there a juice bar in the mall? Lucas kinda remembered going to one with his mom once, but if this was the same one he was remembering, then he probably shouldn’t go back there — Mom and the juice barista had gotten in a pretty weird passive-aggressive argument about chia seeds, and Lucas didn’t want to risk getting his juice cursed by a mall witch, so.

Mark didn’t say anything. Lucas looked at him with concern, and Mark continued to just stand there like a wax figure. “So, like… are you gay now?” Mark said after a second, and Lucas barked out a laugh in surprise.

“What? Oh, no, that’s just Ten,” he assured him.

“I get that his name is Ten, but are you gay?” Mark insisted. “Seriously, I don’t hear from you for, like, a year, and now you’re gay?”

“I’m not gay! That’s just Ten! He’d probably get offended if I didn’t kiss him whenever I see him,” Lucas shrugged. He didn’t know how else to explain the situation. “Ughhhh, I can’t believe now he knows I used to go by Luke. But at least you didn’t tell him about that time I wasted a whole summer trying to get a merit badge in motorboating.”

“Haha yeah,” Mark said. “You had to learn so much about motorboat maintenance.”

Lucas’s phone buzzed and he got it out of his pocket. There was a text from Ten, and he opened it and then immediately held the screen against his chest so Mark wouldn’t see, blushing furiously. Why did Ten always have to send him artsy nudes at the worst possible times?! “Um,” he said, looking for literally anything else to distract him so he wouldn’t just be popping a stiff one in the middle of the mall and right in front of Mark Lee.

Mark side-eyed him. “You, uh…” He looked like he was having some trouble, and Lucas waited for him to finish, which was still better than thinking about the pic Ten had sent. Why was that shirt so see-through?!??!? What was the point!!!! “You wanna go see _The Meg?_ ”

“Is that the one with the giant shark?” Lucas said, perking up immediately, Ten completely forgotten. “Fuck yes! And I was in the middle of a story, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mark nodded, back to looking a little nervous, which was just his resting face. “Um, they told you to get over there?”

“They sure did,” Lucas said with a broad grin. While he resumed talking, they started stomping off to the movie theater, a path through this mall which they both knew very well. It took them right past the food court again, so they got a second round of pretzels.

And by the time they were sitting down in the back row of the theater, both armed with big tubs of popcorn, everything was truly back to normal, and Mark had volunteered a story of his own, something about a chick from a neighboring dorm whom he had an ongoing flirtation with. “But she’s a Gender Studies major, so…,” Mark concluded, his voice trembling slightly with fear and admiration. 

Lucas nodded seriously as if he understood what the shit that meant. “Fucked up, dude,” he said. His phone buzzed again, and he glanced down to check it while the big screen went from showing previews to starting the opening scene of the movie. It was a message from Ten: _send one back >:(_

Lucas smirked (sexily) to himself (and did _not_ go bright red, not even a little) and shoved a fistful of popcorn into his mouth, settling back into his seat. He was very full of pretzels, and he was chilling with his best bud of yesteryear, _and_ he was probably gonna get laid later, sweet. And if he had to miss out on some Jason Statham-giant shark action to send Ten a badly lit movie theater bathroom nude, well, that was nobody’s beeswax but his own!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow.... cwazy..... i know this one was Extra Stupid and self-indulgent but i hope yall enjoyed it regardless!!! pls leave a comment, lmk what u thought, i’ll be back w cdf6 soon!!! im not gonna put all my links back in here bc im lazy but theyre in the end notes of part 1, feel free to subscribe to the series if u want Moar!!! uwu!!!! thank u so much for all ur enthusiasm and comments so far, i lov the feedback, i love all of u, thank u :’’))) peace out binches


End file.
